Welcome to Starfront

Welcome — this is a portfolio of finished astrophotography paired with running notes on the automation that produces it. The rig sits in Rockwood, Texas, an hour west of Brownwood, under Bortle 1 skies. It runs unattended every clear night.

The hardware

A William Optics RedCat 91 WIFD on a ZWO AM5N strain-wave mount, imaging through an ASI2600MM Pro with a ZWO EFW Pro filter wheel and a small library of Antlia filters — V-Pro broadband for galaxies, 3.5 nm narrowband for emission nebulae. Guiding is a UniGuide 32 with an ASI120MM Mini, and a DeepSkyDad FP2 flat panel handles calibration frames at session start.

What's on the site

The gallery section catalogues every published image with full acquisition metadata — sub counts, exposure, dates, the equipment that shot it. The articles section (this is the first one) is for the sequencing and processing notes that don't fit on AstroBin.

A live telemetry page — what the observatory is doing right now, current target, guide RMS, weather, pier camera — is coming next.

A note on automation

The thing I'd most like this site to be useful for is documenting how to make a remote observatory actually run unattended. The full sequence involves NINA's Advanced Sequencer, a safety monitor that watches cloud cover and rain, PHD2 for guiding, and an ASCOM stack glueing it all together. There are a lot of small fragile pieces, and the writeup of each takes longer than the build itself.

So articles will trickle out as the autopilot work generates a story worth telling. If you want the short version: it works most nights now.