Astra

Astra (Automated Survey observaTory Robotised with Alpaca) is an open-source observatory control software for automating and managing robotic observatories. It integrates seamlessly with ASCOM Alpaca for hardware control.

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Features

• Fully Robotic — Schedule once, observe automatically with error and bad weather handling
• ASCOM Alpaca — Compatible with your existing ASCOM equipment
• Cross-Platform — Python based, runs on Windows, Linux, macOS
• Web Interface — Manage your observatory from any browser, use cloudflared or similar to access outside your network
• Comprehensive Docs — Setup, usage, and module reference

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Screenshots

<table> <tr> <td width="24%"> <img src="docs/source/_static/ui-summary-tab.png" alt="Observatory overview"/> <p align="center"><em>Observatory overview</em></p> </td> <td width="24%"> <img src="docs/source/_static/ui-log-tab.png" alt="System logs"/> <p align="center"><em>System logs</em></p> </td> <td width="24%"> <img src="docs/source/_static/ui-weather-tab.png" alt="Weather monitoring"/> <p align="center"><em>Weather monitoring</em></p> </td> <td width="24%"> <img src="docs/source/_static/ui-controls-tab.png" alt="Controls tab"/> <p align="center"><em>Controls tab</em></p> </td> </tr> </table>

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md or the contributing guide.

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License

Released under the GNU GPL v3.

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Support

• Documentation
• Issue Tracker

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Citation

If you use Astra in published research, please cite it as:

@software{Pedersen_Astra,
author = {Pedersen, Peter P. and Degen, David and Garcia, Lionel and Zúñiga-Fernández, Sebastián and Sebastian, Daniel and Schroffenegger, Urs and Queloz, Didier},
license = {GPL-3.0},
title = {{Astra}},
url = {https://github.com/ppp-one/astra}
}

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18890151