Import your FITS collection from the browser

Drop FITS files into the web app and only the headers are read. Review the targets, assign projects, and your archive is cataloged.

You do not need NINA or a desktop tool to put your existing captures into DeepSkyLog. The web app reads the FITS headers directly from your files, in the browser. Only this metadata goes to the server. The pixels stay on your computer, so this is not an image backup.

What you get depends on what your capture software wrote into the header: target, date, exposure, filter, camera, temperature and the metrics it recorded. Files from NINA, AsiAir, KStars/Ekos and Voyager work. The file must be .fits or .fit.

Importing

First create a Location and an Equipment profile under Setup. You can create the projects during the import. Then open Setup > Import Data and press Select FITS files. Many files at once is fine. A progress bar shows how many are parsed, and a tree lists the metadata of each frame, so you can check it before anything is saved.

The frames are grouped by their OBJECT header, which is the target name. A review dialog lists each group with the number of frames and a status: Exact match when the target is already a project, Suggested when a project is likely (check it), or No match.

For every group you can pick an existing project, create a new one from the target, or use Adapt Existing Project. The last one creates projects for the selected targets and copies the equipment, location and filters from a template project, while the names, coordinates and rotation come from the FITS headers. So a whole night with many targets from one setup is one click. You can select several groups and assign one project to all of them. If you shot one target all night, Apply target to all is quicker.

When all groups look right, press Approve & Add to Import List, then Import Exposure Information to save.

Good to know

Import one target from one night first, check the target, filters and metrics in the web app, and only then import the rest, in batches grouped by equipment and location.

You can safely import the same files again, because frames are recognized by a hash of their content and are not duplicated. A frame without the OBJECT header cannot be grouped, and the import stops with a message, so fix the header in your software or the file. If an import fails, nothing is imported and your file list stays, so you can try again. If you have a NINA session JSON, Import Session JSON on the same page brings frames and sessions together.

The free plan allows 20 projects and 200 frames per project (4,000 frames in total). For a bigger archive, the free DeepSkyLog Uploader and the command-line tool do the same job without selecting files in a browser.