Astral Warden
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Remote astrophotography monitoring

It's running.
But are you getting any subs?

Just because your rig is “up” doesn't mean it's producing anything. A hung sequencer, plate solve loop, or autofocus failures can ruin your night. Astral Warden catches the failures that never cause an error, and shows you how much good data you're actually getting.

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30-day trial · no credit card

Kyle Goodwin Built by Kyle Goodwin · @KGoodwin · 26 AstroBin awards
  • Read-only agent
  • Never disturbs your imaging
  • Works behind a firewall

The 2 a.m. problem

Your rig is 2,000 miles away, under skies you're paying a fortune for. Is it imaging right now? Is plate solving stuck in a loop? Are the subs any good?

The worst failures never throw an error. A plate-solve retry loop, a sequence that never started, a hung sequencer, FWHM quietly doubling: nothing fires. You find out at breakfast, and a clear night under those dark skies is gone for good.

Without Astral Warden
  • Remote-desktop spot checks, one rig at a time
  • Ground Station only fires when NINA throws an error, and only mid-sequence
  • Blind to crashes, silent retry loops, and soft subs
  • You discover it at breakfast
With Astral Warden
  • Alerts on the failures that never raise an error
  • Hours of good data, per target, per filter: quality you can trust
  • Every rig, every site, one screen
  • A quiet "all is well" while you sleep or a wake-up when it matters

How it works

Drop in the agent. That's the setup.

Outbound HTTPS only: no VPN, no port forwarding, no server to host, nothing to ask your hosting facility for. Works behind any firewall.

  1. 01

    Drop in the agent

    One small, signed agent on your scope PC. It reads the whole stack: the machine, NINA or Voyager, the mount, the guider, power, weather, and the subs themselves. Read-only: it never touches a file your capture app is writing or interferes with a sequence.

    ~2 minutes
  2. 02

    It checks in

    Everything ships outbound over HTTPS. No inbound ports, no VPN, no port forwarding, so it works behind any hosting site's firewall without asking anyone to open anything.

    Outbound HTTPS only
  3. 03

    Watch from anywhere

    Open the app on web or your phone: every rig, every site, live. Health, per-target data quality, and alerts even on the problems that never throw an error.

    Web · iOS · Android

What you get

Catches what error alerts can't

The failures that never throw an error

A plate-solve retry loop isn't an error. A sequence that never started isn't an error. A hung sequencer isn't an error. Astral Warden correlates guiding, focus, image quality and system state to catch the silent failures, the ones Ground Station and Pushover never fire on. Good guiding but rising eccentricity? Flexure. Sharp autofocus but soft subs? A guiding problem. It connects the dots.

Silent-failure detection Guiding × focus × subs NINA & Voyager Baselined to your rig
Is the data any good?

Not just “no errors.” Good data.

See hours per target, filtered by the quality you demand, like “40 hours of luminance on M63 under 2.0″ FWHM.” Per filter, with Target Scheduler or RoboTarget, or with no scheduler at all.

Knows your normal

It knows what's normal for your rig

Fixed thresholds miss slow drift. Astral Warden baselines your system's own history and flags the anomalies that are specific to your setup, not just a generic number.

Full stack

From disk space to dew heaters

The machine, the OS, NINA or Voyager, the mount, the guider, power, weather, and the subs themselves. If it can ruin a night, it's watched.

Every rig, every site

Chile and Utah, side by side

Northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, three rigs at one site? One dashboard, one set of alerts.

Why not just…

You've tried the workarounds

Here's where each one leaves you blind.

“I already get Pushover alerts from Ground Station.”

Those only fire when NINA raises an error, mid-sequence. If NINA crashes, if the sequence never starts, if plate solving loops all night, if your FWHM quietly doubles: nothing fires. Astral Warden watches the machine, the software, and the subs, and correlates them. And it works for Voyager, where Ground Station doesn't exist.

“I could build this with InfluxDB and Grafana.”

The founder did, with Prometheus, custom exporters, and a VPN, before building Astral Warden. The personal version took more work than the product. You'd host a server, write exporters for gear that exports nothing, solve NAT traversal, and maintain all of it forever, times every rig. Or drop in one agent.

“I just remote desktop in and look.”

That tells you what's happening while you're looking. The failures happen while you're asleep. Remote desktop is a diagnosis tool, not a monitoring strategy.

Built by an imager

Award-winning images, all shot remotely

Astral Warden comes from Kyle Goodwin, whose remote rigs have earned 26 AstroBin awards and counting. A few of them:

See more on AstroBin.

Works at your site

Built for the way hosting sites actually work

Hosting sites have internet out, your PC behind a firewall, and nothing allowed in except remote desktop. Astral Warden needs nothing opened up, it just works at any site.

…and any site that gives your rig PC outbound internet.

Going remote?

The scariest month is the first one. Don't fly it blind.

Before you ship your rig, you run it in the backyard as if it were already remote. That's exactly when to set up Astral Warden: shake out your automation with full visibility, and by the time the rig reaches the hosting site, you already know what “normal” looks like.

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See it for yourself

Explore a sample imaging night with no signup

See a three-rig setup mid-session: live health, per-target data quality, the event feed, and alerts firing when a rig needs a hand. The same screens the app renders. Every visit generates a fresh night.

See a live demo

Pricing

Start free. Pay per rig when you're ready.

Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial: one rig, no credit card. After that it's billed per rig.

Core

Full monitoring for every rig you run.

  • Unlimited rigs, price per rig
  • Full-stack monitoring + silent-failure alerts
  • Per-target data quality, per filter
  • 60 days of history
  • Push + email, or a quiet “all is well”
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Pro

Deeper history and target completion/quality tracking.

  • Everything in Core
  • 1 year of history
  • Target Scheduler progress & per-target quality
  • RoboTarget (Voyager Advanced) tracking
  • Target progress tracking even without a scheduler
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Cancel anytime. Compare all plans →

Safe by design

It installs on the box you can't afford to break

So it's built to be impossible to blame. These aren't just promises, they're how the agent is constructed.

Read-only by construction

Nothing opened for write. No device commands. It observes and reports, nothing else.

Never interferes with imaging

It won't contend for a device, grab a file your capture app is writing, or spike CPU during a sequence.

Outbound-only

All traffic is agent-initiated HTTPS on 443. No listening sockets, no inbound ports, no port forwarding, and nothing to ask your host to do.

Fault-isolated & self-healing

Problems can't take down the agent. It restarts itself, survives reboots, and buffers through internet outages.

Quiet, small, signed

A low-footprint, signed binary that updates itself so you never have to touch it on the box again.

Built by an imager

Astral Warden knows what's important because it was built by an award-winning, remote imager.

Stop finding out at breakfast.

Put Astral Warden on every rig. Know it's healthy, know the subs are keepers, and wake up only when it matters.

Start free See a live demo

30-day trial · no credit card