3  A Tour of the Interface

Everything in Polaris happens in one web page. The left edge of that page is a sidebar, the main navigation rail; each button on it opens one panel, and some panels add a row of pills or tabs across the top for sub-views. The sidebar is deliberately ordered like a real session, top to bottom: connect your equipment, pick a target, focus, guide, capture, watch, process. This chapter walks the rail once, shows what is always on screen regardless of the panel, and ends with a task index for the moments when you know what you want to do but not where it lives.

Figure 3.1: The Polaris UI, here on the SKY tab: the sidebar rail on the left, connection and guiding badges in the top bar, and host telemetry (CPU, memory, disk) in the bottom status bar.

3.1 The sidebar, top to bottom

HOME is the landing dashboard shown when you connect. It summarizes the session at a glance and offers quick jumps into the other panels; the next section describes it.

RIGS is the equipment hub. Here you pick and connect your camera, mount, focuser, filter wheel, and guide gear, and you save each combination as a named rig so switching between a permanent setup and a travel kit is one click. Every way Polaris can talk to equipment lives here too: INDI (the standard driver system for astronomy gear on Linux), ASCOM Alpaca (the network flavor of the Windows ASCOM driver standard), classic ASCOM COM on Windows, the camera makers’ own driver libraries (native SDKs), and the DSLR drivers, along with the embedded INDI Drivers Manager. Chapter 5 covers it in full; DSLR bodies get their own chapter in Chapter 6 and mounts and accessories in Chapter 7.

POLAR aligns the mount’s polar axis before the night starts, using either TPPA (three-point polar alignment) with a live refinement loop, or a rudimentary single-target method for sites without a view of the pole. See Chapter 9.

SKY is the Sky Explorer: an offline interactive sky map where you search for targets, frame them with a draggable field-of-view overlay, plan mosaics, and command slew-and-center. Its pill row adds Tonight, altitude curves and the best objects for your site and date, and Weather, current conditions and the forecast. See Chapter 10.

FOCUS handles focusing and field analysis: manual stepping with a live HFR readout (HFR, half-flux radius, is a per-star size measure; smaller numbers mean sharper focus), the automated V-curve auto-focus (which samples star size across a range of focuser positions and moves to the minimum), a Bahtinov mask helper, and the tilt and aberration inspection tools. See Chapter 11.

GUIDE starts, stops, and monitors autoguiding (a second camera watches a star and continuously corrects the mount’s tracking) through either the built-in guider or an external PHD2, the free guiding program most amateur astrophotographers use, including calibration and the live guide graph. See Chapter 12.

PREVIEW takes single test exposures for framing and focus checks, streams continuously if you want live framing, and can plate-solve the current frame (plate solving matches the stars in the frame against a catalog to work out exactly where the telescope is pointing). See Chapter 13.

AUTORUN is the straightforward sequence runner: a frame list (exposure by count per filter, gain, and binning) shot unattended against the current target, plus end-of-session actions and the Flat Wizard for automated flats. See Chapter 14.

PLAN is the multi-target night planner in the ASIAIR style: queue several targets with time windows and per-target frame lists, review the elevation chart, and let it run the whole night with automatic slews, plate-solve centering, and meridian flips (the side swap a German equatorial mount must make as a target crosses the meridian). See Chapter 16.

LIVE is live stacking for electronically-assisted astronomy (EAA: observing on screen as the image builds up in near real time): frames are aligned and integrated as they arrive, with optional per-frame calibration and pixel rejection, and the growing stack can be saved at any time. See Chapter 17.

VIDEO covers planetary and lucky imaging (shooting thousands of short video frames and keeping only the sharpest): high-frame-rate capture to SER files (a raw video format made for planetary work) with ROI subframing (reading out only a region of the sensor, for higher frame rates), frame-quality scoring, and a lucky-imaging stacker that keeps the best frames. See Chapter 18.

ADV is the Advanced Sequencer, a N.I.N.A.-style tree of containers, instructions, conditions, and triggers for automated nights that outgrow AUTORUN and PLAN. See Chapter 15.

STUDIO is where captured data becomes a finished image: a file browser for everything on the host (Chapter 19), master generation, calibration, grading, and integration (Chapter 20), channel combination for mono and narrowband work (Chapter 21), color calibration up to PCC and SPCC (photometric methods that set the color balance by comparing your stars against catalog measurements; Chapter 22), the AI cleanup tools (Chapter 23), star removal and blending (Chapter 24), and the non-destructive EDITOR (Chapter 25).

SETTINGS holds global configuration and host management, from the observer location to networking, authentication, and self-update. An overview follows below; the details are split between Chapter 27 and Chapter 28.

HELP is the in-app guidance panel: tutorials, a first-night checklist, troubleshooting, and a one-click problem report. More on it below.

3.2 The HOME dashboard

HOME is the first thing a connecting browser sees. It shows a session summary: the active rig, the connection status of each device, and what Polaris is currently doing. Quick-navigation shortcuts jump straight into the panel you need next. A host-info card identifies the machine running Polaris: model, operating system, architecture, core count, and CPU. When something feels wrong mid-session, HOME is the one-glance answer to “what state is everything in?”.

3.3 Always on screen

A few UI elements are present no matter which panel is open.

The top status bar is the session’s instrument cluster. It carries connection badges for INDI, Alpaca, and PHD2, the camera temperature, the live-stack frame count, the battery level of the client device, the clock, and the guider’s dither and settle state (dithering nudges the mount slightly between frames so noise does not stack up in the same pixels; settling is the short wait for the mount to steady again afterwards). It also hosts a global sequence-abort button, the green Update badge that appears on .deb installs when a newer release exists (Chapter 28), and the LOG badge described below. Next to it, activity and transfer chips report live network throughput, in-flight uploads and downloads, and image-frame and exposure progress.

Toasts are the transient notifications that slide in when something completes or fails. They disappear on their own, but nothing is lost: every toast is captured in the debug log.

The LOG badge opens the debug log panel, which collects every server log line, HTTP request, toast, and browser error into one filterable stream, exportable as a JSONL file (a plain-text format with one log entry per line, easy for tools to read) for bug reports. When you file an issue, this is the attachment that makes it actionable; Chapter 28 covers it.

Two smaller conveniences round out the frame: multi-instance tabs let one browser manage several Polaris hosts side by side, and dismissable health chips surface host problems such as Raspberry Pi under-voltage warnings.

3.4 SETTINGS at a glance

The SETTINGS panel gathers everything that is global rather than per-panel. Expect to find:

  • Profiles and location: the observer location (with a first-run setup modal), units, and app-wide preferences.
  • Appearance: theme and font picker.
  • Plate solving: solver choice and downsampling (shrinking the image before solving, for speed), plus a Colour calibration data card showing the status of the APASS star-brightness catalog, spectra, and sensor curves used by PCC and SPCC (Chapter 22).
  • AI inference: settings for the ONNX AI models (ONNX is the file format the AI models come in) and the on-device model downloader (Chapter 23).
  • Network mode: the ASIAIR-style hotspot-to-station WiFi panel (Chapter 27).
  • Remote access: the relay for encrypted (TLS-tunneled) access from outside the LAN, HTTPS setup, and authentication (Chapter 27).
  • Remote terminal: an embedded SSH terminal (a remote command line for the host machine) for managing a headless host, one with no monitor or keyboard, from the browser (Chapter 28).
  • Clock sync: push the browser’s UTC time to a Pi without a real-time clock (Chapter 28).
  • Equipment simulator: the built-in fake rig that renders real stars (Chapter 8).
  • Benchmark: synthetic workloads to compare hardware, with a saved results history (Chapter 28).
  • Power: host power actions, the self-update check, and the version rollback list (Chapter 28).

3.5 Getting help inside the app

The HELP panel is the built-in manual for the moments you do not have this book at hand. It contains step-by-step tutorials, from capture-to-export to specific workflows such as LRGB mono, planetary, and photometric color calibration, plus a guided first-night checklist (the same ground Chapter 4 covers) and a troubleshooting accordion with links into the full user guide. The Report a problem action opens a pre-filled GitHub issue or discussion with client and server diagnostics already attached, so a useful bug report is one click, not an archaeology session.

3.6 Where do I go to do X?

When you know the task but not the panel, this table is the map.

Task Go to Notes
Connect my gear RIGS Pick each device, click Connect, save the combination as a rig
Set my location SETTINGS The first-run setup prompts for it; change it here later
Polar align POLAR Choose TPPA or Rudimentary and follow the steps
Find a target SKY Search or browse the map; drag the FOV box to set rotation and framing
See what is good tonight SKY, Tonight pill Altitude curves and ranked targets for your site and date
Check the weather SKY, Weather pill Current conditions and forecast
Go to and center a target SKY Slew-and-center slews, plate-solves, and re-centers
Snap a quick test shot PREVIEW Set exposure and gain, take one frame
Plate-solve the current frame PREVIEW The Plate solve button
Auto-focus FOCUS Runs the V-curve sweep and moves to best focus
Focus by hand FOCUS Watch HFR, or use the Bahtinov overlay
Start guiding GUIDE Connect PHD2 or the native guider, calibrate, guide; the graph shows RMS (the average guiding error)
Image one target unattended AUTORUN Set exposure, gain, filter, and count, then start
Image several targets in one night PLAN Targets with time windows and per-target frame lists
Live-stack (EAA) LIVE Start the loop and watch the stack grow; save as you go
Planetary or lucky imaging VIDEO High-fps capture, SER recording, stack the best frames
Take flats AUTORUN, Flat Wizard Automated flat acquisition
Complex conditional sequences ADV The tree-based Advanced Sequencer
Browse or open my files STUDIO The file browser; double-click or View opens the viewer
Pick the best subs and stack them STUDIO Add your light frames (the subs), grade them, integrate the keepers
Color calibrate STUDIO Color Cal (PCC) or SPCC on a plate-solved RGB master; re-solve via Solve if matches are low
Combine channels (LRGB / SHO) STUDIO The Combine tool
Background extraction, denoise, deconvolution, upscale STUDIO The AI tools, or the EDITOR’s AI section
Remove stars STUDIO Star removal, then blend back if wanted
Edit (stretch, curves, crop) STUDIO, Editor Opens on an image
Compare before and after The comparator Opens after a tool runs; keep the stretch toggle on Independent for color changes
Change the plate solver or downsample SETTINGS, Plate solving
Color-calibration data status SETTINGS, Colour calibration data APASS, spectra, and curve status
Network, remote access, HTTPS, relay SETTINGS See Chapter 27
AI and ONNX model settings SETTINGS See Chapter 23
Tutorials and troubleshooting HELP

3.7 If you are just lost

Start at HOME for status, then follow the sidebar top to bottom; it is ordered like a real session: RIGS to connect, SKY to pick a target, FOCUS, GUIDE, then AUTORUN or PLAN to capture, LIVE to watch, and STUDIO to process. HELP has a guided first-night checklist, and the next chapter (Chapter 4) walks that same path with you in half an hour.