Quick Start

Vesper Orbit is a macOS desktop application that crawls a single domain and downloads its media (PDFs, images, audio, video) into a clean per-site folder. This guide walks through installation and your first scan in under five minutes.

1. Requirements

macOS - Apple Silicon or Intel.
Google Chrome - Orbit uses Chrome as its rendering engine via Puppeteer. If Chrome is not installed, install it from google.com/chrome (opens in a new tab) before launching Orbit.

2. Install Vesper Orbit

Download the correct .dmg from the Vesper Orbit page: the Apple Silicon build (arm64) for M-series Macs, or the Intel build for older Macs.
Open the .dmg and drag Vesper Orbit to your Applications folder.
Launch Vesper Orbit from your Applications folder. On first launch, macOS may ask you to confirm you want to open it - click Open.

Not sure which build to download?
Click the Apple menu → About This Mac. If the Chip line says Apple M1, M2, M3, or M4, you want the Apple Silicon build. If the Processor line names an Intel chip, you want the Intel build.

3. Run your first scan

Launch Vesper Orbit. The idle screen shows the URL field, the four media-type pills (PDFs, Images, Audio, Video - all on by default), and a Subdomains toggle.
Type or paste the domain you want to crawl. A bare domain (example.org) is fine - Orbit will prefix https:// for you.
Toggle off any media types you don't want. The renderer prevents turning all four off at once.
Click Start scan. Luna (the amber moon at the top of the window) starts animating, and the page count begins climbing.

4. Find your output

By default, downloads land in ~/Downloads/ in a per-site folder named after the host plus a timestamp:

~/Downloads/archive-example-org-2026-05-07-1430/
  pdfs/
  images/
  audio/
  video/
  _manifest.csv

Open _manifest.csv in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets to see every URL Orbit attempted, where it landed locally, and any status flags (ok, too_large, error, skipped_type). See Output Structure for the full reference.

5. Stop or close mid-scan

Click Stop scan at any time to abort cleanly - everything captured so far is saved. If you close the window or quit Vesper Orbit during an active scan, Orbit will ask whether to keep scanning or stop and close. Keep scanning is the default.

Next steps

Media Types - what each pill captures and what it doesn't.
Exclusions - skip dynamic-page traps that would otherwise generate thousands of pointless page loads.
Output Structure - the full per-site folder reference.
Troubleshooting - if anything didn't work as expected.