OpenAstro Guider
OpenAstro Guider is the guiding daemon that runs alongside AlpacaBridge on your imaging server. Ara sets it up for you — the profile wizard connects it, picks your guide camera and mount, fills in sensible defaults, and builds the dark library automatically. But everything is also yours to inspect and tune from a browser-based interface.
Guide
The Guide tab is mission control: the live camera view, loop and guide controls, dithering, and a real-time guide graph with RA/Dec corrections in arc-seconds:
Polar Align
Three ways to polar align, right from the browser: Static PA with the pole in view (fastest), Polar Drift near the pole (simplest), or classic Drift Align anywhere in the sky. Auto mode can rotate a goto mount by itself between measurements:
Equipment
Equipment profiles hold your guide scope's focal length and pixel scale, and the devices come straight from AlpacaBridge — guide camera, mount, and optional rotator are all Alpaca devices on your network:
Settings
The guiding algorithms are fully tunable — Hysteresis and Resist Switch with per-axis aggression, pulse limits, declination compensation, star-detection thresholds, and camera gain. Ara's wizard sets sane defaults; you can always go deeper here:
Darks
A dark library makes star detection dramatically more reliable. Ara builds one for you during setup, and the Darks tab shows its status — or lets you rebuild it, manage a bad-pixel map, and control what loads on connect: