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 — under any of the popular open-source all-sky capture packages — ARIS joins it rather than replacing it.

How it works

The ARIS companion service installs on the machine that runs your camera: the rig’s own computer, or the separate machine your all-sky stack 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. The companion never touches exposure or capture settings.
• 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 the ARIS companion service installed alongside your capture software.
• The companion machine and your rigs on the same local network.

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.

Calibrate the sky view

Pairing and calibration live in Settings → SkyNode: pair the camera with your rig, calibrate the sky view so the fisheye maps to true altitude and azimuth, and tune cloud detection for your site. Two 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.

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

In development

Some sites have no computer within cable reach of where the camera should stand. For those, the dedicated SkyNode is in development: a small Wi-Fi device built on a $25-class Raspberry Pi board that carries the camera and joins your network the way a phone does. It just carries the camera — your rig computer keeps doing all the thinking, exactly as with the other paths.

No dates yet; it will be labeled here the moment status changes.

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.