Safety Monitoring at Starfront with NINA

Overview

Remote observing requires attention to detail – especially details that can affect the ability of your equipment to shoot targets each night. That’s where safety monitors come into play in NINA. Safety monitors aren’t just for “is the roof open?”! You can chain a number of different things together to determine when it’s “safe” to actually take pictures. Our telescope at Starfront uses both data from their weather station (windspeeds) as well as from their roof system (open/closed). In our case, we want to shoot when both:

1. The roof is open
2. Wind speeds are below ~15mph (6 m/s)

Only in the case where both are true do we declare “safe” and continue shooting.

Implementation

To do this with NINA is relatively simple. You need three different plugins (for Starfront – other remote observatories may be different):

1. The Generic File Safety Monitor ASCOM driver
2. The Interactive Astronomy Sky Alert Remote ASCOM driver
3. Nicolas de Hilster’s Safety Monitor Hub ASCOM driver

These three work together to allow us to define what is “safe”.

Safety Monitor Hub

The secret sauce to all this is the Safety Monitor Hub ascom driver. Seen below you can see the configuration screen. Make sure to READ THE DOCUMENTATION FOR ALL OF THESE DRIVERS. I take no responsibility for mis-configured drivers causing issues.

In the Hub you want to select both the generic file and the environment safety monitor file from sky alert, similarly to below. Then you can click the wrench icon to configure that specific driver. Once configured, click the “plug” icon to connect the driver.

Roof Status Monitoring

There’s plenty of documentation in the Starfront discord on finding the roof status file so I will NOT be going over that here. Suffice it to say I mapped the share drive to “Z:” on our remote system for ease of use.

Weather Safety

When you click the wrench to configure the weather driver you need to add your thresholds. Please note that NINA works in METRIC NOT IMPERIAL. So you’ll need to know your thresholds in metric (ie, meters per second vs miles per hour for wind). Use Google. It’s your friend.

Below we’ve set our “SAFE” threshold for windspeeds below 6.0 m/s (about 15mph). So any time the wind exceeds that speed the safety monitor will trigger UNSAFE and our sequence will behave appropriately.

Weather Data

In your WEATHER equipment system you can connect to the remote data as below. This is just so NINA can see the weather and display it to you. However, you DO need to connect the weather driver to the weatherdata file so the safety monitor hub works properly. This is what should show up when you click the wrench in the environment safety monitor above.

Conclusion

This was a quick and dirty post since there’s been a ton of questions about weather monitoring. If it helps, great. If it doesn’t help, sorry – but use Google a bit and I’m sure you can figure it out! As usual, your mileage may vary and EVERY SETUP IS DIFFERENT. Do not just use our values thinking they will work for YOUR telescope and mount.