Last updated 14 August 2026
Chatstronomy is a program you run on your own computer. It is not a hosted service, and there is no account to sign up for. These terms describe what the software does, what we do and do not do, and what you take on if you let it control a telescope.
Chatstronomy is a chat bot for your telescope. It watches an N.I.N.A. imaging session and posts it to a Discord or Matrix channel as it happens — captures, autofocus results, status. If you turn it on, it also accepts slash commands typed in that channel and passes them to your rig.
You install it. You supply the Discord bot token or Matrix login. You point it at your own equipment. It runs under your control, on your hardware, on your network. In the version these terms cover, nothing routes through a server we operate.
A coordinating service is planned, for running several observatories together. It does not exist yet, and nothing described here depends on it. When it ships it will handle data on our side and will carry its own terms saying exactly what it holds and for how long — these will not be quietly stretched to cover it. Until then, read this page as covering the self-hosted application only.
The source is published under the Apache License 2.0 at github.com/theatrus/spacecat. Those licence terms govern the software itself; the page you are reading covers the application as you use it.
The self-hosted application talks to nothing of ours, so there is nothing on our side to collect, store, sell, or lose. No telemetry, no analytics inside the application, no crash reporting, no licence check, no account.
Everything the program keeps lives on your own machine: your configuration file, including the tokens you provide, and a small state file recording the identifiers of the chat messages it maintains, so it can update a status post rather than repeat it. Deleting the program and those files removes everything it kept. See the privacy statement.
Whatever you tell it to post. Images, session status, equipment readings, and any text it sends go to Discord or Matrix, and once there they are held by that service under that service's terms, not ours. Your bot connects directly; we are not in the path and cannot see, retrieve, or delete any of it.
Treat a chat channel as a place other people can read. Astronomical images carry headers, and a channel's membership can change. Deciding what is safe to post — and to which channel — is yours.
Your use of Discord remains subject to the Discord Terms of Service, and Matrix to whichever homeserver you use.
Read this before enabling write commands. Chatstronomy can pass slash commands to your equipment. Turning that on means a message typed in a chat channel moves real hardware, in the dark, with nobody standing next to it.
Control is off unless you enable it. Out of the box the bot posts; it does not act. When you do enable it, the slash commands include parking and unparking the mount, aborting a capture, and starting, pausing or stopping a sequence, among others.
Two safeguards exist, and you should understand both of their limits:
Neither safeguard can protect you from the underlying risk: your equipment's safety depends on the security of a third-party chat account. If a permitted Discord account is compromised, or a bot token leaks, or you invite the bot to a channel whose membership you have not checked, the attacker's reach is the reach of your allow list.
Consider what your rig does on a bad command. A mount that slews or unparks can strike a pier, wrap a cable, or drive optics into an obstruction. An aborted capture loses a sub; a stopped sequence loses a night. Nothing in a chat channel knows whether your roof is open, whether the sun is up, or whether someone is standing at the eyepiece.
So, plainly: enable control only if you accept that risk, keep the allow list short, protect the accounts on it, and keep the physical and software limits your equipment offers — horizon limits, meridian limits, roof interlocks — configured and working. They, not this program, are what stops a mount from hurting itself.
Chatstronomy is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, as set out in the Apache License 2.0. It is unofficial software with no affiliation to N.I.N.A., Discord, or Matrix.
To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for damage to equipment, lost imaging time, lost or exposed data, or any other loss arising from using it — including anything that follows from enabling telescope control. You run it; the consequences of running it are yours.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
Do not use Chatstronomy to control equipment you are not authorised to control, and do not use it in a way that breaks the terms of the chat service you connect it to.
These terms may change as the software does. The date at the top is the version in force, and history is public in the site's repository. Because there are no accounts, there is nobody for us to notify — checking this page is the only mechanism, which is one more reason it stays short.
Questions, and anything that looks like a security problem, belong at the project's issue tracker.