Photonkeeper

What it does

• Imports everything new off the telescope, SHA-256 checksumming each file as it copies rather than in a second pass.
• Sends sessions back to the scope — filtered by target, date, exposure or gain — hashing on the way out and reading back to confirm.
• Frees onboard storage, but only for sessions it has just verified against your archive.
• Files M 42, M42 and NGC 1976 as one target instead of three folders.
• Re-checks the whole archive for bit-rot later, remembers what it found, and can fetch damaged files back off the telescope.
• Every operation has a dry run that shows exactly what would happen first.

Session folders are never renamed and nothing inside one is ever altered — all the organising happens in the directories above them.

Try it without a telescope

There's a demo mode with sample data and a separate sample archive, so you can watch the whole round trip work before pointing it anywhere near your own sessions. Telescope → Try Demo Mode.

Screenshots

Installing it

Unzip it and drag Photonkeeper to your Applications folder. The first time you open it macOS will ask:

Click Open. That's the normal prompt for any downloaded app — Photonkeeper is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so you get a single click rather than the block macOS shows for unsigned software.

Checking what you downloaded

For an app whose whole job is checksumming your data, here's a checksum of itself. Run this on the downloaded file:

aee8989ea6a9bc4f2b9c266b164f691f9a368f98d56521a37aeb5d11157cee67

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
• A DWARF 3, connected over USB.
• Somewhere to keep the archive — an external drive is fine, and it's remembered even if you move or rename the folder.

Got a DWARF Mini?

Photonkeeper is built and tested against a DWARF 3. Whether it would work with a Mini comes down to a few things I can't answer without one in front of me: whether it mounts as a normal disk when you plug it in, whether its files sit in an Astronomy folder, and what its session folders are called.

If you have a Mini and five spare minutes, this would settle it. Connect the Mini over USB, open Terminal (Applications → Utilities), and paste this:

It is read-only. It lists what's mounted, looks for an Astronomy folder, prints the names of one session's files, and asks macOS what the device calls itself. It never opens, copies, moves, renames or deletes anything on the telescope. If you'd rather read it before running it — a sound instinct with any command a stranger gives you — this downloads it and opens it in TextEdit first:

Then run bash mini-check.sh once you're happy with it.

Copy everything it prints and send it to support@chryse.co.uk. A screenshot of the Terminal window works just as well. That output tells me whether Mini support is a small change or a different app.

Get in touch

Bugs, confusion, feature requests, or a Mini report: support@chryse.co.uk. If something went wrong, the Activity pane inside the app has a log — a screenshot of that is the single most useful thing you can send.