Log NINA sessions automatically

Send frame metadata from NINA to DeepSkyLog as you capture, and review each night the next morning.

The sequence is running, the guiding looks fine, and you go to bed. In the morning the questions are always the same: how many frames did I get, did the autofocus work, was the guiding good? The DeepSkyLog plugin for NINA sends the metadata of every frame while it is captured, so the answers are already waiting, and you wrote nothing down.

What you find in the morning

The frames are grouped into a session and added to the project that matches the target, with the location and equipment profile you chose in the plugin. Open the project, go to Log and expand the night. There you see the autofocus results with HFR (how sharp the stars are), the focus curve of each run and a guiding summary.

During the night the Live page shows the current session: mount position, camera and focuser temperature, guiding, safety state, and events like autofocus runs, meridian flips and roof movements. It updates every few seconds, so you can check on the rig from any browser. Full-detail telemetry is kept for 7 days and then as 5-minute summaries for a year, the frame metadata is stored separately.

What is sent

For each exposure the plugin reads the FITS header and sends values like filter, exposure time, temperature, HFR and FWHM (star width), together with the session time, location and target coordinates. The images themselves are never uploaded. Darks, flats and bias frames can be left out with a setting in the plugin; their metadata is not used for anything yet, so it makes sense to turn that on. Only metadata leaves your computer.

Setting it up

Install DeepSkyLog from Options > Plugins in NINA, restart NINA, enable the plugin, sign in and pick your Location and Equipment profile. You need NINA 3.0 or newer, and a paid plan or the trial. The Free plan has web imports and the DeepSkyLog Uploader, but not the plugin.

After the first captures, look at the web app before you leave a long sequence running. Check that the target, filters, location and equipment of the new project are right. All the steps, the settings and troubleshooting are in the NINA integration guide.

For captures from before the plugin, use the free DeepSkyLog Uploader or the command-line tool, see combine FITS from AsiAir, Ekos, Voyager and NINA.