Astryx Walkthrough
Astryx is a planning tool for people who image the night sky. Everything from picking a target to reading back what your rig actually did lives in one place, and it runs in your browser or as a native desktop app. Here's a full night, start to finish.
Fourteen thousand deep-sky objects, searchable by catalogue designation or common name. Sh2-101, NGC 6857, the Tulip — same object, any of the names you happen to know it by.
Or work the other way round: filter by type, size, and magnitude until fourteen thousand objects become the dozen that suit your focal length, your sky, and this month.
Park the candidates on your To Do List. Each one carries a live altitude graph, so the target that climbs high and stays there is obvious without opening anything.
Before committing a night, check whether the target is even worth it this month. Yearly Observability shows the full twelve months at a glance: when it clears your horizon, how long it stays up, and where the moon gets in the way.
Then narrow to the night itself. Altitude curve, astronomical twilight, moon rise and set, and your own minimum imaging altitude — all on one timeline, so you know exactly how many usable hours you actually have.
Viewfinder pulls real sky-survey imagery and overlays your actual field of view — your telescope, your sensor, your framing. Drag the box to recompose; Astryx remembers where you put it.
Not sure what to shoot? The Optimizer scores every candidate against altitude, moon separation, and moon phase for a specific night, and ranks them. It will also plan a multi-target night, working out how the available dark hours split between them.
A night is not just exposure time. Dithers, autofocus runs, downloads, and the meridian flip all take minutes you won't get back. The Sequence Planner accounts for every one of them, so the sub count you plan is the sub count you come home with.
Meridian flip timing is derived from the target's own coordinates and transit time, not a flat guess pasted across every target. The gap in your imaging is where it will actually be.
The night happened. Record it: target, gear, exposure, subs, conditions. Your equipment and locations are already saved, so nothing gets retyped — and nothing in active use can be deleted out from under your history by accident.
Sessions roll up into projects, and projects into programs. Total integration on a target across every night you've ever pointed at it, without a spreadsheet.
Every clear night you used, and every one you didn't, laid out as a year. Streaks, gaps, and the long stretch where the weather won — all visible in one square.
Drop in your ASIAir and PHD2 logs and Astryx reads them together. Not two reports to cross-reference — one account of the night, built from both.
Guide RMS measured on frames that were actually tracking, with dither settles excluded rather than quietly averaged in. A number you can compare between nights, because it means the same thing every night.
Calibration orthogonality drifting. Dithers biased in one direction instead of mixing. Signal-to-noise falling away at two in the morning when twilight can't be blamed. Astryx surfaces these with the log lines behind them, so a finding is evidence, not a guess.
Where did the night go? Every minute assigned to imaging, dithering, focusing, or flipping — and the remainder shown explicitly rather than hidden. That unexplained twenty minutes is usually the interesting part.
Five themes, including low-light options built for a dark observatory, and colourblind-accessible visuals throughout. Guided tutorials cover every view, and pick up where you left them.
Your targets, sessions, and settings live in a database on your own machine — not someone else's cloud. Back it up in one click, restore it on another machine, and run the whole thing offline.
Plan the night. Frame the target. Budget the time. Log what you caught. Read back what really happened. Astryx is free, runs in your browser, and installs as a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
