Your personal astrophotography co-pilot, built into Polaris.
An optional AI companion for your imaging sessions. It plans the night, drives your rig through Polaris with your approval, watches focus and guiding, inspects your frames, and answers astrophotography questions, right inside the Polaris web UI. A friendly co-pilot for beginners and a time-saver for everyone.
Plans your night. Suggests targets for your sky, time, and gear, then builds a ready-to-run multi-target plan in PLAN mode for you to review.
Drives the rig, with approval. Anything that moves hardware or changes a running session is proposed as a plan you approve, review, or reject first, so you stay in control.
Looks at your images. Ask 'is this frame good?' and it inspects the current frame (focus, star shape, trailing, gradients, framing) and tells you what to fix.
Knows astrophotography. Grounded answers on focusing, guiding, exposure, filters, polar alignment, calibration, and diagnosing bad subs.
Cloud or fully offline. Run it in the cloud, on your Polaris host, or on your own device. Two of the three are free and never leave your hardware.
Tell it what you feel like shooting and it does the legwork.
It operates Polaris for you, but never behind your back.
A second pair of (very patient) eyes on every sub. Cloud backend only.
Ask anything, get a grounded answer, not a guess.
It follows the language you set in Polaris.
Your conversations aren't ours to keep.
Canopus proposes; you approve; your browser executes the approved action on your local Polaris over the LAN. The brain can live in three places (the cloud, your Polaris host, or the device you are using), but it never talks to your telescope directly.
Choose the brain. Run the assistant in the cloud, on your Polaris host, or on your own device. Pick the backend in Settings, Assistant; everything else is identical.
Browser bridge. Your browser executes approved actions on your local Polaris API and streams status back. There is no inbound connection to your rig.
Opt-in and off by default. The open-source Polaris ships a neutral, inactive host. The assistant appears only if you choose to enable it.
One assistant, your choice of brain. All three drive the rig the same way and share the same approve-first safety. Pick one in Settings, Assistant.
The most capable brain, always on, nothing to install.
The assistant's AI runs on our servers and returns a reply; your browser relays approved actions to your local Polaris.
Free and fully offline, running on your Polaris host.
A small language model runs on the Polaris host itself, so any phone or tablet on your network becomes a thin client. No account, no subscription.
Free and offline, running on the computer or phone you are using.
The model runs on your own machine. On a desktop it uses a local LLM server you run on the native GPU; in the mobile app it runs the model on the phone.
Every backend asks before it changes anything and shares the same core planning, navigation and rig-control tools. The cloud tier adds image analysis, the multi-target planner and post-processing. The exact tool names are listed under each capability.
| Capability | Cloud | On this host | On this device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Planning and advice | |||
Tonight's best targets, catalog search, altitude tracks and the astronomy weather forecast get_tonights_best, search_catalog, get_altitude, get_weather | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Answer astrophotography and Polaris questions from the built-in manual search_knowledge | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Live session and rig control | |||
Read the live rig status and switch the Polaris UI to the right panel get_status, show_panel | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Slew the mount and plate-solve-center on a target slew_to | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Run an automated V-curve autofocus run_autofocus | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Start live (EAA) stacking and dither on demand start_live_stack, dither_now | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Stop the running capture sequence stop_sequence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Park or unpark the mount, stop guiding, stop live stacking park_mount, unpark_mount, stop_guiding, stop_live_stack | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Multi-target planner | |||
Create, list, start and stop a full multi-target night plan create_plan, list_plans, start_plan, stop_plan | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Image analysis (vision) | |||
Inspect a captured frame, the selected library frame, or the current on-screen view analyze_frame, analyze_selected_frame, analyze_current_view | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Post-processing (STUDIO) | |||
Read library stats, refresh and list frames, grade, integrate and preview results get_studio_stats, refresh_library, list_frames, grade_frames, integrate_frames, preview_frame | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Nature of the backend | |||
| Proactive monitoring and nudges during a session | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Works with no internet connection | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cost | Subscription (US$4.99/mo) | Free | Free |
| Runs on | Our cloud (Azure) | The Polaris host | The device you browse from |
Mutating actions (anything that moves the mount, changes capture, or stops a running task) always show an approval card first, on every backend.
Only the cloud backend costs anything. Running the assistant on your Polaris host or on your own device is free, with no account.
✨ 7-day free trial
Pricing is for the cloud backend. The on-host and on-device backends are free. Single flat plan; cancel anytime and access continues to the end of the paid period.
The assistant is optional and opt-in, with free offline backends; Polaris itself stays free and open-source.
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