App Overview & Navigation

Astro PM organizes a complete astrophotography workflow – from choosing targets to watching subs arrive – into a handful of panels. This page is a map of where everything lives and how the pieces fit together. The Main Areas Projects – your imaging projects: target, exposure plan, progress, constraints, charts, and weather for each one....

Equipment Library

The Equipment panel is the foundation everything else is built on: scheduling needs your site coordinates, framing needs your optics, and exposure plans need your camera and filters. Enter it once, accurately, and the rest of the app takes care of itself. Observing Sites A site is a physical location: name, latitude, longitude, and elevation....

Imaging Systems

An Imaging System is a named rig: one site, one telescope, one camera, working together. Examples: “Dome A – EdgeHD 8 – ASI2600MM” or “Backyard – RedCat 51 – ASI533”. Nearly everything downstream is organized per system: projects belong to one, the simulator schedules one at a time, and each NINA installation identifies itself as...

Exposure Plan Builder

An exposure plan is a reusable recipe: a set of filter lines that describes how you image with a particular scope + camera pair. Build it once, apply it to every new project in one click. Building a Plan Plans are created in the Filters panel. A plan is tied to a telescope + camera...

Creating Projects & Targets

A project is one target being imaged by one rig: M31 on the backyard refractor is a different project from M31 at the dark-sky site. The project tracks everything – coordinates, rotation, the exposure plan, progress per filter, and the constraints the scheduler must respect. Creating a Project Choose the imaging system (rig) that will...

Mosaic Planning

Large targets get mosaics: multiple overlapping panels, each imaged like a target of its own. Astro PM plans panels, tracks per-panel progress, and schedules them intelligently so a mosaic finishes as a coherent whole. Creating a Mosaic Frame the target in Sky View and set the panel grid and overlap percentage. Astro PM computes each...

Target Visibility & Charts

The Target Charts answer the planning question that matters most: when is this target actually worth imaging from my site, with my filters? Reading the Chart For each night across the season the chart shows the target’s altitude arc, the dark hours, and – most importantly – the recommended exposure band: the green region marking...

The Nightly Simulator

The simulator is the heart of Astro PM: it takes every active project on a rig and builds tonight’s minute-by-minute plan – which target, which filter, which exposure, in what order, from dusk to dawn. What you see here is exactly what NINA will execute. Step 1: Strategy & Settings The settings row at the...

Scheduling Strategies

Two philosophies of dividing a night, plus a set of tie-breakers and guards. This page explains what the scheduler is actually doing so its decisions never feel like a black box. Proportional Time The default. Every active project gets a fair share of the usable night, weighted by how much work it has remaining and...

Moon Avoidance Profiles

The moon does not ruin every filter equally: 3nm Ha shrugs off moonlight that makes a Luminance sub worthless. Astro PM models this per filter, so a bright-moon night is automatically spent on narrowband instead of being wasted. How a Profile Works A moon avoidance profile assigns each filter its tolerance for the moon –...

Custom Horizons

Most sites do not have a flat horizon – there are trees to the east, a roofline to the south. A custom horizon file teaches Astro PM the real skyline so the scheduler never plans imaging into an obstruction. The .hrz File A horizon file is a simple text list of azimuth / altitude pairs...

Weather Forecasting

Astro PM includes astronomy-focused weather: cloud, seeing, and transparency outlooks per site, organized around imaging nights rather than calendar days, plus a satellite loop for the synoptic picture. The Forecast Panels Weather appears in two places: the site weather panel (Equipment) and the Weather tab inside each project. Both show the same engine: hourly cloud...

Sky View & Framing

Sky View is a full planetarium built into Astro PM – an interactive sky canvas with real survey imagery, deep-sky catalogs, and your equipment’s actual field of view drawn on the stars. This page covers the framing workflow and the Position & Equipment toolbar; companion pages cover surveys & star rendering, overlays & catalogs, and...

Sky View: Surveys & Star Rendering

The Sky Surveys panel (blue tab on the right edge) controls what the sky itself looks like: which imagery is behind your framing, and – on the built-in starfield – exactly how stars are drawn, down to the magnitude limit. The Seven Surveys Survey What it is Default Survey Astro PM’s offline starfield: 118,000 Hipparcos/Tycho-2...

Sky View: Overlays & Catalogs

Two side panels turn the sky canvas into a planning instrument: Sky Overlays (green tab) draws reference lines, your horizon, and your project fleet on the sky; Sky Catalogs (purple tab) controls twelve deep-sky object catalogs. Project Overlays Every project can appear on the sky as its FOV rectangle, color-coded by status – each status...

Sky View: Time Controls & Timeline

The bottom bar makes Sky View a time machine: set any date and time, scrub through the night, watch the sky move in real time, and read a target’s whole night at a glance from the 24-hour timeline. Date & Time Controls Year / Month / Day spinners set the date (arrows step, boundaries wrap...

Image Analysis Overview

Astro PM’s analysis suite is four tools that share one goal: know exactly what you captured, keep only what deserves stacking, and understand what your optics are telling you. The Four Tools Tool Job Sub Inspector Batch review: load a whole folder of subs, measure them all, grade with adjustable thresholds, and reject the bad...

Sub Inspector: Grading Your Subs

Sub Inspector is where a night’s haul gets judged. Point it at a folder, analyze everything, and separate keepers from rejects – by eye, by metrics, or both – without ever deleting a file. Loading & the Thumbnail Grid Open Folder (or drag a folder onto the panel) scans recursively for FITS/XISF subs. Each sub...

Image Analysis: Optical Diagnostics

One sub, examined properly, can tell you whether your focus plane is tilted, your optics are collimated, your flats are keeping up with vignetting, and whether that donut in the corner is dust on the sensor or the filter. The Image Analysis panel is that examination. Loading & Star Detection Open Image loads a FITS/XISF/TIFF...

Image Annotator: Plate Solving & Catalogs

The Annotator answers “what exactly is in my image?” – plate solve the frame, overlay professional catalogs, identify every smudge, and export a labeled version worth sharing. Step 1-2: Load & Plate Solve Open a FITS/XISF/TIFF, then solve it with your choice of engine: ASTAP – local and fast (path configured in Settings). astrometry.net –...

Initial Settings