D
Dashboard
Targets, integration time, sessions, equipment — at a glance. The starting point.
FITS archive ledger for astrophotographers
Know exactly how much you've imaged. And on what.
Photon Ledger reads every FITS header in your archive — headers only, never pixel data — and turns it into integration time, per target, per filter, per scope, per location, per session.
Targets
142
unique objects
Sessions
604
imaging nights
Integration
1,662h
across all filters
Frames
69,618
indexed sub-frames
What one user catalogued in their first scan.
What's in the box
Six tools for the work you've already done
Every tab in the app maps to a question you've been asking your file system the hard way.
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Scan
Index 60,000+ frames in minutes. Headers only — your pixel data never moves.
T
Targets
Drill into every object: filter breakdown, session count, total exposure, equipment used.
A
Activity
Group integration time by month, telescope, camera, target, filter, or location.
E
Equipment
Discover which scope you're actually using. Per-rig hours and per-filter histograms.
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Settings & data
SQLite by default. PostgreSQL on Pro. Your data, your machine.
How it works
Three steps from folder to ledger
Pick a folder
Point Photon Ledger at the root of your imaging archive. Date-first or target-first layouts both work.
Scan
Headers are parsed in parallel. A typical 60,000-frame archive indexes in a few minutes.
Explore
Open Dashboard, Activity, Equipment, Targets — answer the questions you've never had answers to.
Pricing
Free for hobbyists. Pro when you outgrow it.
Free indexes up to 5,000 frames on SQLite — enough for most beginner archives. Pro removes the cap, adds a PostgreSQL backend, CSV export, and every future feature, for a one-time $39.
Stay in the loop
Get the v1.0 release email
One email when v1.0 ships, occasional release notes after. No drip campaigns, no upsells.
FAQ
Common questions
Does Photon Ledger upload my data anywhere?
No. Scanning is fully local. The only network traffic is an optional weekly license recheck which sends a license ID and an anonymous machine fingerprint — never any scan data.
Does it read my image pixels?
No. Only FITS headers are parsed. Your image files are never opened past the header bytes.
What folder structures does the scanner understand?
Both date-first (archive/2024-08-13/Light/M81/*.fit) and target-first (archive/M81/2024-08-13/LIGHT/*.fits) layouts. Details.
What if my archive is on a NAS?
Works fine over SMB/NFS. The bottleneck is small-file metadata reads, not bandwidth. Expect roughly 200–500 frames/second on a typical 1 GbE NAS.