Built & developed in Australia
Astroworx Starship is a complete control and automation suite for deep-sky astrophotography. Plan it, point it, focus it, guide it — then let it run unattended until the work is done.
Starship isn't rented software with the good parts locked behind tiers. It's a tool we build, use, and rely on ourselves — shared with the community for the price of a coffee a month.
Your AUD $5 isn't a licence you're forced to buy. It's support for a small, independent team that actually listens, fixes things, and keeps shipping — every feature, for everybody, no tiers. We only build upon the experience and learnings of the giants before us, and we're grateful to the open-source community and the standards Starship stands on.
Our mission: a functional, reliable tool for the astronomy community.
From the first focus run to the last frame before dawn — all in one calm, consistent place.
Build a sequence per target in a clear, visual editor — filters, exposures and counts, with dither, autofocus and meridian-flip rules baked in. Group your night, reorder with a drag, and Starship runs it exactly as written.
Give Starship a pool of targets and a goal — hours per filter, minimum altitude, moon avoidance — and it decides what to shoot, and when, across as many nights as it takes. It picks the best target as the sky turns and keeps going until every goal is met.
A blockscript turns the night into a simple state machine: start up, run your scheduler or sequence, and shut down. The live safety verdict steers it — pause on a warning, park and close the roof if it turns unsafe, resume when it clears. Set it once and walk away.
Frame your target over a real sky view, lay out a mosaic, and check tonight's visibility — altitude, transit, observable window and moon — from a bundled offline catalogue. Then send it straight to the sequencer or scheduler.
A multi-star V-curve autofocus plus temperature-aware refocus that keeps stars tight as it cools.
Tight PHD2 guiding with fail-fast checks, so a bad night stops cleanly instead of wasting hours.
Plate-solve & sync, blind solve, and automatic meridian flips — it always knows where it's pointing.
A safety supervisor watches the sky and your roll-off or dome, and fails closed when conditions turn.
Mount, cooled camera, focuser, filter wheel, rotator and power — from one calm, consistent console.
A built-in FITS viewer with auto-stretch and full headers, so you can check the night at a glance.
Email or Pushover notifications on safety events and sequence milestones — wherever you are.
Works with the gear you already own — any ASCOM or Alpaca mount, camera, focuser or wheel.
Four built-in themes — a dark default, daytime Light, a red night mode, and High contrast. Switch any time.
No trials, no tiers, no add-ons. Support the work, and everything Starship can do is yours.
Everything. Every feature and every update, with nothing locked behind a higher tier. It's one simple price for the whole of Starship.
No — we keep it simple: pay and use. There's no trial to forget to cancel and no tiers to compare. Cancel anytime, and your access runs to the end of the month you've paid for.
Anything that speaks ASCOM or Alpaca — mounts, cameras, focusers, filter wheels, rotators and observatories — plus PHD2 for guiding and ASTAP for plate solving. Starship runs on Windows.
Yes — that's the point. The scheduler runs a whole campaign across nights, a blockscript handles startup, safety and shutdown, a self-healing health monitor keeps things running, and alerts reach you if anything needs a human. It parks safely when conditions turn or the night is done.
Yes — four built-in themes: a dark default, a daytime Light mode, a red night mode, and High contrast. Switch any time.
A small, independent team in Australia, led by developer Diego Colonnello. We build it because we use it — and your support is what keeps it independent and improving.
Astroworx Starship is built and developed in Australia — proven night after night under the dark skies of regional Victoria. The Southern Cross is our mark for a reason.