360° Panoramas & Horizon Profiles

A generic flat horizon lies to you. The planetarium says your target is up for six hours; the oak tree says four, and the neighbor’s roofline has opinions about the last one. ARIS fixes this by learning your actual site: walk it once with your phone, and the Plan view starts computing rises and sets against your skyline — trees, buildings, and all — so you can see how much sky each target really gets from where you actually stand.

Capture your site

Capture runs in the phone app (it needs the camera and motion sensors — this part isn’t available in the browser).

1. Stand where the telescope stands. The horizon is measured from the camera’s point of view, so capture from the pier, not the porch.

2. Sign in, then open Settings → Horizon Profiles → Capture 360°. Sign-in is required because the frames upload to your account for stitching.

3. Follow the guided overlay. As you turn, it shows you where to point next, frame by frame, until the site is covered all the way around.

4. When the walk is complete, the app uploads the frames and the stitch starts automatically.

The stitch

Stitching happens server-side — your phone uploads the frames and gets the result back, so the heavy lifting doesn’t depend on your phone’s hardware. A typical stitch takes 2–3 minutes, and the app shows progress while it runs.

The output is an 8K equirectangular panorama (8192 × 4096) of your site. Your captures are private to your account.

Horizon extraction

The panorama is the raw material; the horizon profile is the point. From the stitched image, ARIS:

• Finds your true horizon line — the actual boundary between sky and everything that blocks it, all the way around.
• Segments the obstructions — trees, buildings, and other structures are identified, not just merged into a blob, so the profile tracks the jagged reality of your skyline rather than a smoothed guess.

The result is an altitude-vs-azimuth profile of your site: at every compass bearing, ARIS knows how high an object must be before you can actually see it.

What it changes in the Plan view

With a horizon profile active, planning stops being theoretical:

• Real rises and sets. Targets rise when they clear your trees and set when they hit your roofline — not when they cross an idealized 0° horizon. Altitude charts and imaging windows account for the skyline at each target’s actual azimuth track.
• Honest session lengths. You can see at a glance how much usable sky a target really gets tonight, and pick targets whose tracks thread the gaps in your obstructions.
• Your site, rendered. The panorama itself can be shown in the Plan view as the ground and skyline around the chart, so the view matches what you see when you look up from the eyepiece.

If something goes wrong

The captured frames stay on your phone until the stitch succeeds, so a failed upload or stitch never costs you the walk:

• Upload or stitch failed? Retry from the capture screen — no need to re-walk the site. On a failure you can also save the frames and logs locally.
• Left the app mid-stitch? The app remembers the in-flight job and picks it back up when you return.

If a stitch repeatedly fails, recapture with steadier framing — consistent overlap between neighboring frames is what the stitcher needs most.

Already have a panorama?

If you’ve captured a 360° equirectangular panorama of your site with other gear, you don’t need to re-shoot it: use Import 360° in Settings → Horizon Profiles to bring it in, and ARIS extracts the horizon profile from it the same way.

Tip

Capture per site, not per session. A horizon profile describes a place — do the walk once for the backyard, once for the dark-site pad, and switch between them as you travel.