Astral Warden
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Remote astrophotography monitoring

The scope's up.
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 cover that never opened isn't an error. A plate-solve retry loop isn't an error. A scheduler that keeps restarting targets isn't an error. Your capture app reports all three as running, so Ground Station and Pushover never fire, and you find out at breakfast. Astral Warden catches these silent failures. And when the subs go soft, it checks focus, guiding and the sky against each other and tells you which one did it.

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

Every frame, guiding and temperature reading, and every warning and error your programs log is recorded all night, whether or not anyone is watching, and kept for 60 days (a year on Pro). That history is the baseline. Fixed thresholds miss slow drift, so Astral Warden compares tonight with your rig's own nights and flags what's unusual for your setup, not some generic number. Any past night opens on the web or your phone.

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.

What it catches

Every alert says what happened and what to check

Is it imaging
  • Dark, roof open, nothing running. The sequence never started, or ended early.
  • 30 minutes with no exposure started. Stuck on a slew, centring, autofocus or guide settle.
  • An exposure finished and no image was saved. Usually a camera driver that hung, a USB drop, or a save folder that's full or gone.
  • A step stuck on a device for 5 minutes. A flat-panel cover, filter wheel, mount, dome, focuser, rotator or the guider stopped answering. On one real rig, a cover close sat for 9.4 hours with no error.
  • 5 targets started, no frames saved. The scheduler is thrashing.
  • Exposures starting after the roof closed. You're imaging the inside of the roof.
  • Your capture app crashed mid-sequence. With the error that crashed it.
Is the data good
  • Focus drifting between autofocus runs. It gives you the autofocus trigger that would fix it.
  • A focuser creeping off its focus point. It's slipping or losing steps.
  • Doubled stars while guiding looked perfect. Something moved that the guider never saw.
Is the equipment healthy
  • A camera that won't hold its setpoint. The cooler is maxed out or failing.
  • A rotator hunting back and forth. Usually its reverse setting is wrong.
  • A device that keeps faulting or reconnecting. Mount encoders, cables, drivers.

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.

“I already have a NINA app on my phone.”

A plugin inside NINA stops when NINA does, so a crash or a lock-up only shows as lost contact. Astral Warden runs beside your capture app and also watches PHD2, the mount controller, the power box and Windows. Every night is kept in the cloud and opens on the web or any device. And its alerts are built for rigs nobody is watching: a scheduler restarting targets, an exposure that never saved, a step stuck on a device.

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.

Featured talk Winning the Safety Game: Protecting Your Observatory from the Unexpected The Astro Imaging Channel · November 2025 TAIC invited Kyle to talk about keeping a remote observatory alive when things go wrong. The incredible response led to the realization that lots of people have the same problems. Astral Warden is the result.

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.

  • No limit on rigs, priced per rig
  • Full-stack monitoring + silent-failure alerts
  • Per-target data quality, per filter
  • 60 days of history
  • Push and email alerts
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Pro

Deeper history and target completion/quality tracking.

  • Everything in Core
  • 1 year of history
  • NINA Target Scheduler progress & quality
  • Voyager RoboTarget progress & quality
  • Synthetic Target Scheduler for target progress 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.

Questions

Can it move my gear?

No. It only reads. It never sends a command to your mount, camera, roof or anything else.

What happens if NINA crashes?

Astral Warden keeps running, because it's a separate program, and tells you what happened.

Where is my data kept, and for how long?

On our servers, for 60 days on Core or a year on Pro, with independent backups. We keep the numbers about each sub, not your image files.

Do I need to open any ports?

No. It only makes outbound HTTPS connections, so there's nothing to ask your hosting site for.

What if the site's internet drops?

It buffers on the PC and catches up when the connection returns.

Will it slow down my imaging PC?

No. It polls gently and never locks a file your capture app is writing.

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