Features

The landing dashboard shown on connect.

• Session summary active rig, connection status of each device, and current activity at a glance.
• Quick navigation jump straight into the panel you need.
• Host info model, OS, architecture, core count, and CPU of the machine running Polaris.

Multi-rig equipment hub. Define several telescope setups (rigs) and switch between them in one click.

• Multi-rig profiles save each optical train (main scope, camera, mount, guider, accessories) as a named rig; the whole app retargets when you switch the active rig.
• Per-role device cards Main Telescope, Camera, Mount, Focuser, Filter Wheel, Guidescope, Guide Camera, Guide Focuser, Rotator, Flat Panel, Dome, Weather, and Power Box (switch/dew hubs like Pegasus UPB, over INDI/ASCOM/Alpaca, with per-outlet toggles and dew-heater sliders), each with connect/disconnect and live status.
• Auxiliary camera and focuser a second imaging camera on the same mount with its own optics, exposure, and gain, captured in parallel into a separate aux folder and focusable from the FOCUS tab (manual or Auto V-curve).
• Gain and ISO aware astronomy cameras show analogue gain with an ISO explainer; DSLR and mirrorless bodies (gphoto on Linux) get a real ISO dropdown.
• Connection backends in one place INDI (TCP/XML) full native client; ASCOM Alpaca (HTTP) auto-discovery and connect; ASCOM Platform (COM) Windows-only direct driver access; native vendor SDKs (ZWO ASI, Svbony, Player One, ToupTek, and Altair) driven directly; DSLR via Canon, Nikon, and Sony on Windows, gphoto2 on Linux.
• Per-rig optical data main and guider focal length (auto-updated from plate solves), a filter offsets table, and per-camera quirk overrides (Bayer pattern, vertical flip) for cameras that report wrong metadata.
• Robust INDI handling ack-based property writes, configurable per-device pre-connect delays, and idempotent connect logic.
• Embedded INDI Drivers Manager the indi-web UI inside the panel, so you can add or remove INDI drivers and start or stop the indiserver without SSH.
• Wedged-driver watchdog when a single INDI driver stops delivering frames (a dropped BLOB), Polaris restarts just that driver automatically, rate-limited and hardware-safe; every running driver also has a one-click restart, leaving the rest of the server untouched.
• Live INDI property tree browse and set any INDI property directly.

Get the mount's polar axis aligned before the night starts.

• TPPA (Three-Point Polar Alignment) plate-solve-driven. Capture, slew, and solve at three points, then a live error vector tells you which way to turn the altitude and azimuth bolts.
• Refinement mode a continuous capture and solve loop with an on-screen error overlay that updates as you adjust, so you converge to near-zero.
• Rudimentary mode single-target alignment helper for setups without a clear view of the celestial pole.

Plan what to shoot and where to point.

• Offline sky map interactive sky atlas with bundled star data; works with no internet at the scope.
• Real sky-survey background a real photo background for the map, with a survey picker: DSS Colour (the offline-capable default, provisionable roughly 30 MB to 400 MB), plus DSS2, Mellinger, 2MASS, and unWISE streamed from CDS. DSS Colour works fully offline at the telescope, with an online fallback when you have internet.
• Target search find deep-sky objects by name or catalog from the bundled DSO database, or enter manual RA/DEC.
• DSO preview thumbnails a real photo of every catalogued object on search results, atlas cards, and the Tonight list, a fully-offline bundled cutout covering every object with coordinates (about 17,700 images across M, C, NGC, IC, Arp, Sh2, and more), so galaxies and nebulae are easy to tell apart at a glance.
• FOV overlays and framing draw your camera's field of view on the map, rotate it, and drag to frame a target; the blue (mount) and red (target) rectangles track plate-solve results, plus a pink rectangle for the auxiliary camera's field when an Auxiliary Camera System is configured.
• Aux FOV confirmation a plate solve from SKY fires a parallel solve on the auxiliary camera's own hardware, so the pink rectangle reflects the true rotation and scale the aux photo will come out with.
• Slew & center send the mount to a target and plate-solve-center on it.
• Mosaic planner lay out multi-panel mosaics over a target, with a live preview of the tile grid drawn right on the sky map as you adjust columns, rows, and overlap.
• Tonight altitude curves and the best objects to image for your location and date, with twilight and night windows, one entry per object (designations like M31 and NGC 224 are merged), a preview photo on each card; the ranking also surfaces large emission and dark nebulae that carry size but no stellar magnitude.
• Weather current conditions and forecast for the observing site.
• Stellarium sync drive the view from and to a Stellarium instance.

Achieve and verify focus, and diagnose the optical train.

• Manual focus step the focuser in and out with a live preview canvas and real-time HFR (half-flux radius) plus Laplacian-variance sharpness readout.
• Auto-focus automated V-curve sweep with parabola fit; robust on heavy defocus, with an HFR-vs-position chart of the run. An optical-train selector runs the sweep on the main, auxiliary, or guide camera and focuser pair.
• Aux and guide focusing Camera and Focuser source switches (Primary, Auxiliary, or Guide) target a second OTA or a motorised guide scope; the manual jog (position, range, GoTo, abort) follows the selected motor.
• Bahtinov mask helper overlay analysis of a Bahtinov diffraction pattern for precise manual focus.
• Field analysis tools shared capture with multiple views. Tilt: a sensor-tilt map from corner-vs-center star sizes. Aberration Inspector: a 3x3 mosaic of 1:1 corner and center crops to judge coma, astigmatism, and backfocus. Inspector: full-field star metrics (eccentricity, FWHM) to spot collimation and spacing problems.
• Sensor analysis characterize the camera sensor itself.

Keep stars round during long exposures, with two interchangeable backends.

• Native guider PHD2's guiding math ported to C#, driving the rig's guide camera and mount directly with no external PHD2 process. Multi-star guiding, per-equipment calibration save and restore, dithering with ASIAIR-style settle readout, star-lost detection with a responsive watchdog, a predictive algorithm option (periodic-error and drift modeling), and meridian-flip awareness.
• ZFilter algorithm a low-pass guide algorithm ported from PHD2 that smooths guide noise and seeing while still chasing slow drift, with a per-rig exposure-factor tuning to dial in responsiveness for your gear.
• PHD2 integration full control of an external PHD2. Connect, manage profiles and equipment, set exposure, launch and shutdown, smart calibration orchestration, guiding-algorithm presets, and the embedded PHD2 GUI in the browser via xpra (Linux) or noVNC.
• Live guiding telemetry RA/Dec error graph, RMS, and dither/settle state surfaced in the top status bar.

Quick framing and check exposures.

• Snap single frames with chosen exposure, gain, and binning, with optional save.
• Continuous stream mode for live framing.
• Plate solve from preview solve the current frame and sync or center.
• Full image tools stretch controls, statistics, star annotations, and crosshair/grid/pixel readout (shared with the Studio viewer).

A straightforward sequence runner against the current target.

• Frame list editor rows of exposure x count per filter, gain, and binning.
• Polaris Shutter start and stop control with live progress.
• End-of-session actions warm the camera and cooler off, park or go-home, send the focuser to zero, and optional host shutdown.
• Flat Wizard sub-tab automated flat-field acquisition with binary-search exposure per filter, a trained-exposure cache, and per-rig defaults.

ASIAIR-style whole-night planning: queue several targets, each with its own frame list, run in order with automatic slew and plate-solve-center.

• Multiple targets per plan added from catalog search, manual RA/DEC, the current mount position, or framed visually in the Sky map.
• Per-target frame lists and a first-light delay.
• Scheduling start now or at a clock time; end when all frames are done, at astronomical dawn, or at a set time.
• Plan-level automation auto guiding, auto cooling (with target temp), per-target or initial auto-focus, and auto meridian flip with exposed flip tuning (minutes-after, recenter, autofocus-on-flip).
• End actions warm and cooler-off, park or go-home, focuser-to-zero, and a confirm-gated host shutdown.
• Elevation chart of each target across the night for sanity-checking the order.
• Global plan library saved plans live in a global library, runnable with any active rig, and can be exported and imported as JSON to share between hosts.

Real-time electronically-assisted-astronomy stacking that builds an image as frames arrive.

• One-tap shutter the shutter runs the whole session ASIAIR-style: tap to start stacking, tap again to stop (the stack is kept, so you can continue or restart), with a live readout of integration time, frames stacked, and frames discarded.
• Continuous integration with live alignment (star matching) and a growing preview.
• Per-frame pre-processing optional calibration (auto-matched master dark/flat/bias) and GraXpert background extraction applied before each frame is added, running wherever the stack runs: in the browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU, or server-side through the GraXpert CLI or the RK3588 NPU.
• OSC color stacking automatic for one-shot-color cameras.
• Kappa-sigma pixel rejection optionally reject per-pixel outliers (cosmic rays, plane or satellite trails, dithered hot pixels) instead of folding them into the running mean; per-rig, and best paired with dithering.
• Auto re-focus and re-center triggers kick off an auto-focus or a re-center when HFR drifts or the target wanders.
• Save the current stack to FITS at any time, into a dedicated stacked folder.
• Client-side compute offload on a slow server (Pi 2/3) the stacking math can run in your browser via WebAssembly instead of the host.
• Server-side capture loop an optional, experimental mode that runs the capture loop on the server, so the stack keeps building even if the browser disconnects.
• Reference-frame suggestions to improve alignment quality.

High-frame-rate capture and stacking for planets, the Moon, and the Sun.

• SER capture high-fps video recording (tested to about 100 fps) with ROI subframing.
• Frame-quality analysis Laplacian-variance scoring to rank frames.
• Lucky-imaging stacker keep the best N% of frames and stack them.
• Slew preview inset a small live view while you center the planet.

A full NINA-style, tree-based sequencer for complex automated nights.

• Tree of containers, instructions, conditions, and triggers with drag-and-drop editing.
• Instruction library camera (cool/warm/expose), mount (slew/park/find home), focuser, filter wheel, guider (start/stop/dither), flow control (wait-until-time), and more.
• Loop conditions and event triggers meridian flip, auto-focus on temperature, HFR, or time, and other operational triggers.
• JSON serialization save, load, and share sequence documents.

Browse, calibrate, and integrate your captured frames on the host.

• Frame browser and library scan and organize captured frames.
• Master generation build master darks, flats, and bias frames.
• Calibration apply masters to light frames.
• Batch stacking register and integrate a set of lights into a master, with progress reporting.
• Drizzle integration optional 1x, 2x, or 3x drizzle (Fruchter and Hook) for well-dithered, undersampled data, with an automatic recommendation computed from the frames' measured FWHM so you only upscale when it actually recovers resolution.
• Channel combine merge per-filter masters into one image: RGB compose (no luminance needed), LRGB (Lab or ratio combine when you have a luminance master), one-click narrowband palettes (SHO, HSO, HOS, HOO) with continuum subtraction (Ha minus R, OIII minus G), free-form PixelMath, and an OSC dual-band mode that pulls Ha, SII, and OIII out of Ha+OIII and SII+OIII one-shot-color masters and combines them with automatic star alignment.
• Color calibration Siril-style and plate-solve-driven: background neutralization (zero-config), manual (background patch and white-reference patch), PCC (Photometric Color Calibration) against the bundled APASS star catalog, and SPCC (SpectroPhotometric Color Calibration) that integrates each catalog star's spectrum through your sensor and filter response for a physically grounded white balance, the way PixInsight SPCC and Siril 1.2+ do. The Pickles stellar spectral library ships bundled, alongside the imported Siril SPCC database of real measured curves for dozens of actual cameras and filters, and SPCC auto-selects the sensor and OSC or mono type from the frame's FITS header (generic curves stay editable for gear that is not in the list). Both PCC and SPCC finish with a white-balance summary plot of measured versus expected channel ratios with a robust line fit.
• Quick processing debayer, background extraction, noise reduction, and sharpening passes.
• Star colour repair fix the one-sided colour fringe (a blue or magenta cast with a dark notch) that some one-shot-colour cameras leave on bright stars, using sub-pixel channel alignment and radial colour and luminance symmetry repair. Neighbour-aware for crowded fields, with a before/after montage of the brightest stars.
• Crop tool with a drag picker, plus an Auto crop button that suggests the largest fully-stacked rectangle to trim the ragged dither borders left by slightly-misaligned integrations; you review and adjust it before saving.

A Lightroom-style finishing editor for your master image.

• Slider-based adjustments grouped into Light, Color, Effects, and Detail, with an auto-tune button for a sensible starting point.
• Non-destructive edits are stored in a sidecar .edit.json next to the source file; the original is never overwritten.
• AI section run GraXpert BGE, Denoise, and Deconvolution from inside the editor with a before/after slider.
• Star removal split a master into starless and stars-only images with an in-browser AI model (nox or starrem2k13, both MIT, or the opt-in StarNet++), launched from the FILES toolbar. Optional halo reduction cleans the rings and halos around bright stars. Writes _starless and _stars FITS and opens a before/after comparator.
• Image Blend recombine two same-size images with an independent blackpoint/midtones/highlights stretch per layer, a blend mode (Screen, Add, or Lighten), and opacity. The PixInsight ImageBlend-style finish for putting stretched stars back onto a separately-stretched nebula, with a live preview and full-resolution 16-bit _blend FITS output.
• Export to JPEG, PNG, or TIFF with quality and resize options.
• Auto-stretch ported from GraXpert (15% background, 3-sigma) as the default display stretch.

GraXpert's AI models run on whatever hardware is fastest, with no per-frame cloud calls.

• GraXpert models Background Extraction (BGE), Denoise (v2 and v3), and Deconvolution (stars and objects).
• Polaris's own models a Detail / Sharpen enhancer, Halo removal (cleans the reflection halos around bright stars), and a 2x/4x Upscaler, all trained from scratch on real astrophotos and quantization-friendly so they run in the browser or on the SBC NPU.
• Star-removal models nox and starrem2k13 (both MIT, bundled) plus the opt-in StarNet++ (NonCommercial). All are FP16-quantized so they run in the browser on phones and tablets via WebGPU, or on WASM.
• On-device model downloader pull ready-made .onnx models onto the device from the bundled SourceForge catalogue or your own bucket, with SHA-256 verification and no Docker or Python on the host (Settings, AI inference, Download models).
• In-browser inference onnxruntime-web uses the client device's GPU (WebGPU) or WASM SIMD; the server just hosts the .onnx files.
• Server-side CLI fallback GraXpert on the host, when you prefer the host to do it.
• NPU acceleration on Rockchip RK3588 boards (RKNPU2, e.g. the Orange Pi 5 Pro) and Qualcomm Hexagon boards (QAIRT, e.g. the Radxa Dragon Q6A), the background-extraction and denoise models run on the NPU about 5x faster than the CPU, freeing cores for live stacking. Automatic, with a CPU fallback.
• Pick your accelerator choose Auto, NPU, GPU, or CPU for the GraXpert AI ops. On boards with more than one accelerator, a Vulkan GPU lane (via ncnn) runs alongside the NPU.
• OpenCL GPU backend image math can offload to the SBC GPU where available.
• RGB FITS support throughout the AI pipelines.

Server-side file browser.

• Browse, download, and manage captured frames and outputs on the host.
• Upload images into Studio or Editor as an entry point for processing.

Global configuration, host management, and connectivity.

• Profiles and location observer location (with a first-run setup modal), units, and app-wide preferences.
• Appearance theme and font picker.
• Network mode (Hotspot and Station) ASIAIR-style WiFi panel. The Pi ships as a hotspot on first boot so you can reach it without a monitor; flip it onto your home WiFi with a 30-second try-and-revert safety net.
• Remote access (Relay) TLS-tunneled access to your rig from outside the LAN, with optional DuckDNS and Let's Encrypt.
• HTTPS setup one-click self-signed certificate (port 5001) so client devices get WebGPU and multi-thread WASM for in-browser AI.
• Authentication login and first-run wizard protecting the UI and API.
• Remote terminal embedded SSH terminal (xterm.js) to manage a headless host from the browser, with a one-click launcher for the native raspi-config or armbian-config tool.
• Clock sync push the browser's UTC to a Pi without an RTC.
• Equipment simulator built-in fake telescope, camera, focuser, and filter wheel that renders real stars at the simulated position, so plate solve, auto-focus, and live stacking all work without hardware.
• Benchmark synthetic workloads to compare hardware (CPU, GPU, and a GraXpert denoise pass on the board's NPU) with a saved results history.
• Software self-update on Pi/SBC .deb installs, a status-bar badge appears when a newer GitHub release exists; one click downloads the matching .deb, installs it, and reloads on the new version. No password needed, authorized via a scoped PolicyKit rule.
• Version rollback Settings, Power, Roll back version reinstalls any recent release over the running one (downgrade included), online or offline through the relay; handy if an update misbehaves.

In-app guidance.

• Step-by-step tutorials capture-to-export, first-night checklist, and specific workflows (LRGB mono, planetary, PCC).
• Troubleshooting accordion and links to the full user guide.
• Report a problem opens a pre-filled GitHub issue or discussion with client and server diagnostics attached.

Features present across every panel.

• Top status bar connection badges (INDI, Alpaca, PHD2), camera temperature, live-stack frame count, client-device battery, clock, guider dither/settle state, a global sequence-abort button, the update badge, and the debug-log badge.
• Activity and transfer chips live network throughput, in-flight uploads and downloads, image-frame and exposure progress.
• Debug log every server log, HTTP request, toast, and browser exception collected in one panel, filterable and exportable as JSONL for bug reports.
• Multi-instance tabs manage several Polaris hosts from one browser.
• Dismissable health chips for example Raspberry Pi undervoltage warnings.

Run it where it suits you.

• One-command .deb install for Debian and Ubuntu on arm64 SBCs (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Radxa) and on x86-64 PCs; the package handles every dependency, the systemd unit, indi-web, and user setup.
• Windows and Linux hosts both supported.
• Docker image and compose for containerized deployment.
• Plate-solving via ASTAP and other solver backends.
• Plugin system for extending the app.