Set Up SkyNode

A SkyNode is any camera-plus-brain feeding ARIS the live sky: cloud detection over your targets, the absolute clear/overcast verdict, and sky-quality readings. This page covers the three ways to run one — what works today, and what is coming.

If you are still picking hardware, start with Choosing a Camera for SkyNode.

Path 1: Through the all-sky setup you already run

Available now

If a camera at your site is capturing frames tonight with the open-source AllSky or indi-allsky software, ARIS joins it rather than replacing it. With indi-allsky a few things work differently: see With indi-allsky below.

How it works

The ARIS companion service installs on the machine that runs your camera, usually the Raspberry Pi your all-sky software lives on. It reads the frames your existing software is already producing, analyzes them, and publishes sky intelligence to every ARIS rig on your network.

Nothing about your current setup changes:

• Your capture stack stays in charge of the camera. On AllSky, the companion changes a capture setting only when you save one in the ARIS app, and it writes it into AllSky’s own settings. indi-allsky’s settings stay in indi-allsky’s own web page: the companion never changes them.
• Keograms, time-lapses, and star trails keep working exactly as before — the companion only reads frames, it never moves or modifies them.
• One camera serves every rig. The companion publishes to all ARIS rigs on the LAN, so a multi-rig yard shares a single sky view.

What you need

• An all-sky camera producing frames with AllSky or indi-allsky.
• The companion machine and your rigs on the same local network.

Install the companion

On the machine that runs AllSky or indi-allsky, run:

curl -fsSL https://downloads.arisastro.com/companion/install.sh | sudo bash

The installer downloads the current release, checks it against its published checksum (and its signature, when minisign is installed), and sets the companion up as a service that starts with the machine. Run the same command again to update it.

The installer finds indi-allsky by itself when AllSky is not installed. If you changed indi-allsky’s image folder (its IMAGE_FOLDER setting), give the installer that folder; it warns you when the folder it uses has no frame in it yet:

curl -fsSL https://downloads.arisastro.com/companion/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- --indi-allsky /path/to/images

Discovery is automatic

There is no address to configure. ARIS finds the companion by name on the network (mDNS), falls back to its last-known address, and as a last resort sweeps the local subnet. The camera survives router reboots and DHCP changes without reconfiguration — you never assign a static IP or touch your router.

With indi-allsky, discovery is not automatic yet: on each rig, open Settings → SkyNode → SkyNode settings, choose Enter a hostname or address under The node, type the address the installer prints (the machine’s hostname followed by .local:8090) and tap Apply.

Calibrate the sky view

Pairing lives in Settings → SkyNode: pair the camera with your rig and tune cloud detection for your site. The sky view calibrates itself: on the first clear, dark night the rig matches a frame against the stars so the fisheye maps to true altitude and azimuth, and fits it again if the camera is moved. Rig setup’s all-sky step runs the same fit on demand. Two more things build themselves over time:

• The sky mask — trees, rooflines, and the camera’s own mount are learned automatically from your camera’s frames and excluded from detection. No hand-drawn horizon polygons.
• The clear-sky reference — the photometric baseline behind the absolute clear/overcast verdict accumulates from your own site’s clear nights. Cloud detection works right away; the absolute verdict arrives once the reference exists.

With indi-allsky

The companion reads indi-allsky’s newest image and, from indi-allsky’s status file, that image’s exposure, gain and brightness and your site’s location. Cloud detection over your targets, the clear/overcast verdict, the learned sky mask, the star fit that calibrates the sky view, and the live sky view on every rig work as they do with AllSky. What differs:

• Set your location in indi-allsky. The companion takes your site from indi-allsky, and indi-allsky’s shipped default location counts as not set. Until you set it, the star fit does not run and cloud detection cannot tell day from night.
• Change capture settings in indi-allsky. Exposure, gain and the rest stay in indi-allsky’s web page; ARIS does not change them and does not restart indi-allsky.
• Enter the camera’s address on each rig. Rigs do not find an indi-allsky camera by themselves yet (see Discovery is automatic).
• Sky quality uses the stars when they show the image is linear, as with any third-party all-sky camera: indi-allsky passes on no raw frame, so the companion measures the stars in its image. For a strongly curved or stretched image, or one with too few stars to tell, sky quality is calibrated from handheld meter readings.
• The overcast verdict waits for your clear nights. With AllSky the companion can call an overcast sky from the exposure alone before its clear-sky reference forms, because it knows AllSky’s longest night exposure. indi-allsky keeps that setting in its own database, which the companion does not read.
• No star count from indi-allsky. It counts stars in the middle of its image only, not across the whole sky, so the companion does not pass that count on.

Path 2: Plugged straight into the rig

Rolling out

Direct raw-camera support — where ARIS drives the camera itself, with nothing else to install — is rolling out.

On this path the all-sky camera plugs into the rig computer over USB and becomes a third camera role on the rig, alongside your imaging and guide cameras. ARIS runs its exposure through the full day/night cycle automatically — short bright-sky frames by day, long frames after dark — with no capture stack to install or maintain.

Path 3: The dedicated SkyNode

Available now

Some sites have no computer within cable reach of where the camera should stand. For those, the dedicated SkyNode is a small Wi-Fi device: ARIS SkyNode OS on a $25-class Raspberry Pi board, carrying a Raspberry Pi HQ camera or a ZWO camera, joining your network the way a phone does. Install a SkyNode walks through writing the card.

It just carries the camera: it captures day and night by itself and every rig on your network shows its live view, while your rig computer does the thinking, exactly as with the other paths. That analysis runs beside the ARIS companion, which an ARIS rig runs itself once it sees the camera is a SkyNode: nothing extra to install; it arrives as a rig software update. A rig where you installed a companion by hand keeps that one.

Note

Whatever the path, the result is the same sky intelligence, consumed the same way — the Plan-chart overlay, the sky-state verdict, and sky-quality readings don’t care how the frames arrive.

If the camera doesn’t show up

Discovery follows the same rules as finding a rig, so the same fixes apply — see Troubleshooting for the network basics:

• Same network? The companion machine and your rigs must be on the same local network. Guest Wi-Fi and VPNs often isolate devices from each other.
• Give the scan a moment. The subnet sweep is the last rung of the discovery ladder and can take a few extra seconds on large networks.
• Remember the NINA caveat. SkyNode data appears on ARIS rig computers; NINA-based rigs do not consume it yet (see NINA Integration).

Still stuck? Contact support with what the SkyNode screen’s connection footer shows.