The AsiAir is a brilliant piece of gear once you're at the telescope, but the moment you drive home or head inside, it's gone — the AsiAir app only finds the controller on your local Wi-Fi. Want to check on an unattended session from your living room, or check the flats finished before you fall asleep at a dark-sky site? You need remote access.

This guide covers both ends: the full manual setup with a VPN (what it takes to get it working, and what you have to keep doing), and the one-click alternative that AstroMate ships.

Manual VPN setup Automatic (recommended)

Why the AsiAir needs a VPN at all

The AsiAir's control app talks to the device over your local network. There's no cloud service, no account system, no port-forwarding option in the AsiAir UI — the app expects the AsiAir to be on the same Wi-Fi it is. When you leave the house, that stops being true.

A mesh VPN (like Tailscale or NetBird) fixes this without you needing to touch your router. The idea: every device you enroll gets a private IP on a virtual network, and any device on that network can reach any other, no matter where they are physically. You add your phone, you add a "helper" device at home that can see the AsiAir on the real Wi-Fi, and you tell the VPN to route traffic for the AsiAir's IP through the helper.

That helper device is the tricky part. The AsiAir itself can't join a VPN — it runs closed firmware you don't control — so something else on your home network has to carry the connection for it. Usually that's a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, or an always-on Linux box.

One-time setup

Plan on an hour or two the first time. The steps below are for Tailscale, which is the most popular choice; NetBird is nearly identical.

1. Pick a helper device and keep it online

Anything with Linux and Wi-Fi/Ethernet to the same network as your AsiAir works. A Raspberry Pi 4/5 is typical. It needs to stay powered on whenever you want remote access — if it reboots, remote access stops until it's back up and the VPN reconnects.

2. Create a Tailscale account and install the client on the helper

SSH into the Pi and run the one-line installer:

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

Bring it up as a subnet router advertising the IP range your AsiAir lives on. If your AsiAir is at 192.168.1.42, you'd advertise the whole /24:
```
sudo tailscale up --advertise-routes=192.168.1.0/24
```
Log in when prompted. The Pi appears in your Tailscale admin.

3. Enable IP forwarding (and make it survive reboots)

The Pi has to actually forward the traffic. By default it won't:

echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf
echo 'net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf
sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf

Forgetting this is the #1 reason "it worked on the couch, broke after a reboot."

4. Approve the subnet route in the admin

In the Tailscale admin (Machines → your Pi → Edit route settings), flip the toggle to approve the 192.168.1.0/24 advertisement. The Pi is now acting as a gateway to your home subnet for every other device on your tailnet.

5. Install Tailscale on your phone

Install the Tailscale app from the App Store / Play Store.
Sign in with the same account.
Your phone is now on the tailnet.

6. Try it

Open the AsiAir app while on cellular (turn Wi-Fi off to prove you're not cheating). In the AsiAir app, enter your telescope's IP manually (e.g. 192.168.1.42). It should connect.

That's the good news.

What you have to keep doing

The "set it and forget it" promise of mesh VPNs is only half true when AsiAir is involved. Here's what breaks and what you'll find yourself doing repeatedly.

The Scan button won't find your AsiAir

The AsiAir app has a friendly Scan button that sweeps the network to find nearby devices. Over a VPN, it doesn't work — Scan sends a broadcast probe, and broadcasts don't travel through mesh VPNs the way they do on a real LAN. You'll be typing IP addresses forever, and you have to remember what they are.

You can work around this by enabling exit node mode on your phone's Tailscale client and configuring your Pi as an exit node. That reroutes everything your phone does through your home internet (slower browsing on the phone, more upload use at home) — and even then, the AsiAir's broadcast protocol has quirks that mean the Scan button often still comes up empty. You'll end up running packet captures to figure out why. This is the part where most guides trail off.

Adding a new telescope

Got a second AsiAir at a different IP? Or moved the rig and your router handed out a new address? You're back in the Tailscale admin:

Update the advertised routes on the Pi: sudo tailscale up --advertise-routes=... with the new range,
Re-approve in the admin,
Update the IP in the AsiAir app on the phone.

DHCP changed the AsiAir's IP

Most home routers reassign IPs on DHCP lease renewal or router reboot. If your AsiAir's IP moves, the one you typed into the app is wrong. You'll either need a DHCP reservation on the router (pin the IP by MAC address) or a fresh look-up every time. A full /24 subnet route covers this as long as the new IP is still in the same /24.

After a Pi reboot

If any of these drifts, remote access stops working:

Tailscale service not enabled to start on boot: sudo systemctl enable --now tailscaled.
ip_forward reverts (you skipped the persistent sysctl step).
Wi-Fi didn't auto-reconnect.
Router renewed your Pi's DHCP lease to a new IP and you'd hard-coded something.

Troubleshooting a dead remote-access link at 1 AM when the rig is tracking a 5-hour M31 run is… memorable.

Multiple phones or family access

Every device gets enrolled individually. Each new phone: install app, sign in, test. If you want to give someone else access (spouse, friend, remote helper), they join the tailnet too, which means they now see everything on the route unless you set up ACLs — and writing tailnet ACLs by hand is a skill in itself.

Automatic Remote Access With AstroMate

AstroMate turns all of that into a single setup screen. You pick your provider — Tailscale or NetBird, free accounts with either — paste one access token, and save. That's it. No manual software package fiddling, no subnet routes to approve, no ip_forward to remember after a reboot. Remote access just works, and it keeps working.

Per-telescope control

Got more than one rig? Or a telescope you'd rather not expose over the VPN? Every telescope on the Remote Access page has its own toggle. Flip it on to make that AsiAir reachable from outside your home; flip it off and it's invisible again within seconds. You stay in full control of what's exposed and what isn't.

Install, paste, done

The Remote Access setup is three short steps on screen:

Pick a provider and sign up (free).
Generate a token in the provider's dashboard.
Paste it into AstroMate.

From there the AsiAir app on your phone can reach your telescope from anywhere — from the couch while the rig tracks in the backyard, from a work trip to check on an unattended session back home, or from your desk the next morning to see how last night went. If something changes on your network, AstroMate picks it up on its own.

If you're running a home observatory or imaging remotely more than a couple of times a year, remote access is worth having — but it shouldn't cost you a weekend every time the router reboots. Give AstroMate a try and let the complexity live somewhere other than your night-time checklist.