Lightbucket is a Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy (N.I.N.A. or NINA) plugin which logs information about NINA imaging session. When enabled and configured details about NINA imaging sessions are automatically sent to Lightbucket each time a sequence image is saved. The Lightbucket website allows you to see where in the sky you are imaging, saves details about your imaging sessions, and shows what others using the Lightbucket Plugin in NINA are imaging.

Lightbucket integrates directly with N.I.N.A. through the plugin system to automatically log whenever an exposure finishes. The plugin logs information about the target, the imaging parameters, and the equipment used to give a complete view of your imaging sessions. The information sent to Lightbucket includes:

• Target Name, RA/Dec, and Camera Rotation.
• Telescope name – taken from the NINA profile.
• Camera name – From the connected equipment.
• Filter, Duration, Gain, Offset, Binning, and Total RMS.
• A 300 x 300 thumbnail of the stretched captured frame.

Lightbucket NINA Plugin is installed using the NINA Plugin system: NINA -> Plugins -> Available -> Lightbucket. Installation will require NINA to be restarted. After the plugin is installed grab your API credentials from here https://app.lightbucket.co/api_credentials and configure the plugin.

Once the Lightbucket plugin is installed and configured with the API credentials details from NINA imaging sessions will be sent to the Lightbucket API. If you do not want to send information about a session you can simply Set Enabled to Off.

When the plugin is enabled session information is sent to LightBucket each time a image is saved during a sequence. The information is then visible on Lightbucket on your dashboard. Your Lightbucket Dashboard displays a star chart which charts the location of targets you have imaged. My Lightbucket Dashboard is here: https://app.lightbucket.co/astronomers/herseyc. The dashboard displays statistics on imaging targets, sessions, and hours for each telescope profile over the past months and years.

If Internet connectivity is not available during a session Offline Mode can be set to On. In Offline mode session information is logged in %AppData%/NINA/Lightbucket These logs can then be manually uploaded to your Lightbucket Dashboard.

The dashboard also has details about in progress and recent sessions.

Sessions can be edited to add notes or to upload stacked and processed images. You can also merge data with other targets, export the target as a NINA sequencer target (JSON), or delete the target data from Lightbucket.

On the Lightbucket main page at https://app.lightbucket.co/ you can easily see who is or has been imaging in the past 18 hours. For the different session you see who is imaging, information about the target and exposures, a small thumbnail, and how long since an image was update and the RMS.

If you have an active imaging session it will be displayed here as well with a Monitor link. From the monitor link you can view statistics about the session. A graph of the RMS, HFR, and other stats over the course of the session.

Lightbucket is a great tool to log and share your NINA imaging session. Visit Lightbucket to see who is imaging tonight, install the NINA plugin to log your imaging session. Very easy and pretty neat.

Clear skies…