FITS Sentinel
Because losing a night of astrophotography to a malformed header is a special kind of pain.
How FITS Sentinel Escaped The Idea Graveyard
Sentinel acts as a surgical watchdog between capture and processing, repairing header malformations in under 100ms without touching your precious pixels. It features write-lock protection and file 'vaccination' to ensure safety before the surgeon operates. Available as a lightweight GUI or headless Docker container for remote observatories.
Genesis Spark
An autonomous background service that heals corrupted astrophotography data in real-time—catching the formatting gremlins before your processing pipeline throws a tantrum.
Core Problem & Insight
Camera drivers from ZWO, QHY, and ToupTek love writing non-standard FITS headers, and rigid tools like PixInsight and Siril love crashing because of them.
Known Chaos
- Camera manufacturers (ZWO, QHY, ToupTek) each decided to interpret the FITS standard differently — EXPOSURE instead of EXPTIME, mangled date strings, missing telescope metadata — turning every capture session into a metadata lottery.
- Processing pipelines like PixInsight and Siril are brutally rigid: one malformed header and hours of valuable data get rejected. Astronomers end up hex-editing files at 6 AM, which is exactly as fun as it sounds.
- Touching FITS files while the camera is still writing them is a fast track to corruption. The repair engine needs to be smart enough to wait, but fast enough to keep up with high-cadence imaging sessions.
Solutions
- A surgical repair engine that normalizes keywords, fixes timestamps, and standardizes number formats against strict astronomical standards — only the metadata header gets touched, raw pixel data stays untouched.
- A vaccination system tags processed files in the HISTORY header, preventing infinite processing loops and double-handling. Once healed, a file is marked and left alone.
- Intelligent write-lock detection waits for files to be fully written before the surgeon moves in — no partial reads, no corruption, no drama.
Arsenal
Python
An interpreted, high-level and general-purpose programming language.
Astro
A web framework for building fast, content-driven websites using an islands architecture.
Nuitka
A Python compiler that converts Python code to C/C++ and creates standalone executables with improved performance.
Astropy
A community Python library for astronomy, providing tools for astronomical calculations and data analysis.
Watchdog
A Python library and shell utilities to monitor file system events in real-time.
CustomTkinter
A modern and customizable Python UI library based on Tkinter, offering beautiful widgets and themes.
Docker
A set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.
GitHub Actions
A CI/CD platform for automating build, test, and deployment workflows directly from GitHub repositories.
Thanks for Peeking Behind the Curtain!
This one's still brewing in the lab. Head back and explore more chaotic creations!