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.
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
- Moving Targets — Non-sidereal tracking of planets, comets, asteroids, and satellites from TLEs
- Web Interface — Manage your observatory from any browser, use cloudflared or similar to access outside your network
- Comprehensive Docs — Setup, usage, and module reference
Screenshots
Observatory overview |
System logs |
Weather monitoring |
Controls tab |
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md or the contributing guide.
License
Released under the GNU GPL v3.
Support
Citation
If you use Astra in published research, please cite it as:
@misc{https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18890151, doi = {10.5281/ZENODO.18890151}, url = {https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.18890151}, author = {Pedersen, Peter P. and Degen, David and Garcia, Lionel and Zúñiga-Fernández, Sebastián and Sebastian, Daniel and Schroffenegger, Urs and Queloz, Didier}, keywords = {observatory control software, ocs, astronomy, control software, ground-based, telescope, camera, ascom, survey telescope, photometry, imaging}, title = {Astra}, publisher = {Zenodo}, year = {2026}, copyright = {GNU General Public License v3.0 only} }
and
@inproceedings{10.1117/12.3105437, author = {Peter P. Pedersen and David Degen and Lionel Garcia and Urs Schroffenegger and Daniel Sebastian and Sebasti{\'a}n Z{\'u}{\~n}iga-Fern{\'a}ndez and Brice-Olivier Demory and Elsa Ducrot and Micha{\"e}l Gillon and Matthew J. Hooton and Cl{\`a}udia Jan{\'o}-Mu{\~n}oz and James McCormac and Mathilde Timmermans and Amaury H. M. J. Triaud and Didier Queloz}, title = {{Astra: an open-source fully autonomous robotic observatory control software}}, volume = {14155}, booktitle = {Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy IX}, editor = {Jorge Ibsen and Valentina Alberti}, organization = {International Society for Optics and Photonics}, publisher = {SPIE}, pages = {141552U}, keywords = {observatory control software, robotic, ground-based, observatory, robotic astronomy, plate solving, autoguiding, autofocus}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.1117/12.3105437}, URL = {https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3105437} }
Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18890151, Proceedings DOI: 10.1117/12.3105437, Arxiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2607.12898