A profile is one way you observe — a telescope and camera, on a mount, at a site, with that site's horizon. It tells the Observatory what to connect to, the planetarium how to frame the sky, and every new sequence what gear it runs on.
What a profile holds
Optics & camera — telescope focal length and aperture, camera sensor size and pixel pitch. Presets fill these in for common gear (Seestar S30/S50 and Pro, DWARF Mini/3/II, and a few refractors). Together they set the field of view the planetarium draws.
Mount & orientation — alt-az or equatorial, and whether the sensor is landscape or portrait (a Seestar shoots portrait on its alt-az mount; a DWARF shoots landscape).
Site — latitude, longitude, elevation and time zone. Used for visibility, the Sun/Moon, and the observing-night calculations.
Horizon — obstructions you draw on the polar editor and an optional zenith limit, so plans never schedule a target behind a tree or through the zenith blind spot.
Connection — how the site reaches your equipment (see below).
Connection types
Chosen in the profile's Connection dropdown. All of them run through the home agent.
Connection
For
How it is reached
Alpaca with agent
Any ASCOM Alpaca device (incl. a Seestar in its native Alpaca mode, port 32323)
The agent forwards ASCOM Alpaca HTTP on your LAN.
Seestar with agent
A Seestar over its own protocol
The agent speaks the Seestar's native protocol and streams its live view.
DWARF with agent
A DWARFLAB telescope (Mini / 3 / II)
The agent speaks the DWARF's native protobuf-over-websocket protocol (port 9900).
The home agent, in detail
When the site runs off your network (hosted), it cannot reach a telescope on your home LAN. The home agent is a small program you run on a machine on that network. It connects outward to astronomy.today over HTTPS, fetches the commands your plan produces, runs them against the telescope, and reports back. Nothing listens for inbound connections, so you open no router ports and expose nothing to the internet.
Create the profile with an agent connection and save it. Saving generates a one-time pairing code that authenticates your agent to the site.
Enter the telescope's local IP in the profile's Home agent box (its address on your own network, e.g. 192.168.1.50). This is saved on the profile but never leaves for anywhere but your own agent config.
Download the agent from the Profiles page. The ZIP is already set up: it contains a configs folder with one JSON per telescope (address + pairing code), a bundled PHP runtime and ffmpeg.
Run start-agent.bat on that machine. It lists your telescopes so you can start one or several. The card on the Profiles/Observatory page turns to agent online within a few seconds.
DHCP addresses can change — you don't need to re-download the agent
On a network with DHCP (the default in most homes) the router can hand your telescope a different local IP after a reboot or lease renewal. When that happens the agent can no longer find it, and the Observatory shows connect errors even though the agent is online.
Fix it here on the site — the agent reads each telescope's address from your profile, so there are no files to edit and nothing to re-download:
Open the profile and set the Telescope local IP (in Alpaca mode, the server address) to the telescope's new address, then save.
The running agent picks up the change on its next check-in — no re-download and no re-pairing (the token is unchanged). If the Observatory doesn't recover within a few seconds, reconnect the telescope from the Rigs page.
Best fix of all: give the telescope a fixed address — a DHCP reservation in your router (bind it to the telescope's MAC), or a static IP in the device — so it never changes again.
Good to know
One agent download covers all your agent profiles at once — one config file each.
The pairing code authenticates your agent to the site. Your telescope's own device key (for example a Seestar's) is only ever held by the agent on your machine — it never leaves your network.
A profile can be the active one (what the Observatory and planetarium use); switch it from the Profiles page. Plans and sequences keep running on the agent even when the profile isn't active or the browser is closed — see the Observatory help.