Open, citizen-built sky survey

A cluster of smart telescopes,
watching the whole sky move.

The Smart Sky Survey links several compact smart telescopes into one array that tiles a region of sky all night long — rebuilding the same mosaic every hour so that anything that moves, brightens, or appears can be caught in the act.

See how it works Partner with us
ZWO Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope, official product photo DWARFLAB DWARF mini smart telescope, official product photo Vaonis Vespera 3 smart telescope, official product photo

Photos courtesy of ZWO / seestar.com, DWARFLAB / dwarflab.com, and Vaonis / vaonis.com — smart telescope platforms this project can support.

~1 hrrevisit cadence per tile
5–10 minstacked exposure per tile
N×Mscalable telescope array
EQ + ASCOMfully scriptable control
The Idea

One big patch of sky, rebuilt every hour

Small telescopes, used together, can do something a single big telescope can't do easily: watch a wide area repeatedly, all night, without moving between completely different targets.

🔭

Array, not a single scope

Several Seestar smart telescopes point at neighboring, slightly overlapping patches of sky at the same time — together they cover one large contiguous field, like tiles in a mosaic.

🕐

Stack, slew, repeat

Each patch is exposed and stacked for 5–10 minutes. Then the whole array slews together to the next patch — tiling across the target region roughly once per hour.

✨

Catch what moves

Because every patch gets revisited about once an hour, all night, asteroids, comets, satellites and transients reveal themselves by shifting or appearing between passes.

How It Works

Two grids, one array

There are two levels of tiling at play: the fixed arrangement of telescopes within the array, and the sequence of sky positions the whole array steps through over the night.

Array arrangement diagram, a 3 by 2 grid of overlapping telescope fields of view Scope 1 Scope 2 Scope 3 Scope 4 Scope 5 Scope 6 Inner grid — fixed array layout (example: 3×2) Overlap between neighboring fields of view accounts for pointing error and alignment margin
Each telescope's field of view is offset from its neighbors by (FOV × (1 − overlap)), in both RA and Dec, so the array's combined footprint tiles cleanly.
Nightly cycle diagram showing the array stepping through sky tiles and looping back every hour Tile 1 Tile 2 Tile 3 Tile 4 Tile 5 after ~1 hour: loop back to Tile 1 — every patch is revisited hourly, all night
Outer grid — the array steps across the target region tile by tile, then loops back to the start, producing an hourly-cadence "mosaic of mosaics."
Combined diagram showing the outer grid of sky tiles, each one itself made of the inner grid of individual telescope fields of view "Tiles of tiles" — each outer sky tile is itself the inner array grid T1 — active now T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 Inner grid: one outer tile's array of telescope FOVs (e.g. 3×2) Outer grid: tiles the array steps through, once per ~1 hour cycle
"Tiles of tiles" — every outer sky tile (T1…T6, stepped through each cycle) is itself made up of the inner array's overlapping telescope fields of view, giving fine coverage inside a wide, repeatedly-revisited survey area.

A night, step by step

  1. Startup & alignment

    Every telescope is leveled, polar-aligned for EQ tracking, and connected over ASCOM/Alpaca to the control host.

  2. Load the night's tile plan

    A precomputed list of sky tiles — generated from the target region, array arrangement, and field of view — is loaded and filtered for the night's twilight window and altitude limits.

  3. Slew as one array

    The control host sends each telescope its own goto coordinate — offset from the array's shared center — so all scopes point at their tile of the current mosaic simultaneously.

  4. Expose & stack

    Each scope exposes and stacks for 5–10 minutes, then the stacked frame is saved with a name that records the scope, tile, and cycle it belongs to.

  5. Move to the next tile — and loop

    The array advances to the next tile in the plan. After the last tile, it loops back to the first, so the whole region gets revisited roughly once per hour until dawn.

Technology

Built on open, scriptable astronomy tools

Every part of the array is controlled and coordinated in software, so the system scales from a couple of telescopes to a much larger array.

🧭 Equatorial (EQ) mounting

Each Seestar runs in EQ mode rather than its default alt-az mode, eliminating field rotation across multi-minute stacks and keeping frame orientation consistent from tile to tile and night to night.

🔌 Option A — ASCOM / Alpaca control

Telescopes are driven through ASCOM Alpaca — an IP-based, scriptable standard — rather than the stock mobile app, so goto, exposure, and status can be orchestrated across the whole array from one place. Best for locally-owned, locally-networked units.

🤝 Option B — Native remote control & "rent-a-scope"

ZWO's own app supports remote control and time-limited device sharing between accounts — so a telescope owner anywhere can lend the project their Seestar for a night. This lowers the barrier to a bigger array: no hardware to buy, no local network to join, just a shared session for the night.

🗺️ Tiling & planning engine

A coordinate-math tool computes per-telescope and per-tile RA/Dec targets from field of view, overlap percentage, and array arrangement (2×2, 3×2, and beyond), and builds the full night's tile plan in advance.

🗂️ Structured data pipeline

Every stacked frame is named and indexed by telescope, sky tile, and hourly cycle — so images can be automatically grouped into time series for detection, or mosaicked into a full picture of the surveyed region.

Data & Science

From raw frames to discoveries

The hourly revisit cadence is what makes the survey scientifically interesting — the same processing pipeline that builds a mosaic can also spot what changed between visits.

StageWhat happensWhy it matters
Per-tile stackingSub-exposures for each 5–10 minute block are combined into one clean frame.Removes noise, boosts faint signal for each patch.
Time-series alignmentAll hourly visits of the same tile are astrometrically registered to a common frame.Makes frames directly comparable, cycle to cycle.
Blink / difference detectionSequential frames are compared to flag anything that shifted or appeared.Surfaces asteroid, comet, and transient candidates automatically.
Candidate vettingDetections are cross-matched against known object catalogs.Separates already-known objects from genuinely new finds.
Mosaic assemblyAll tiles from one pass are combined into a single wide-field image.Gives a full-region view of the sky and validates the tiling itself.
Get Involved

Built to grow with more telescopes, more sky, more eyes

The array design scales — more Seestars mean more sky covered per hour, or a tighter revisit cadence on the same region. There's room for collaborators at every level.

Astronomy enthusiasts

Contribute observing time, help refine the tiling and control software, or "rent" your own Seestar to the project for a night via remote device sharing — no local setup required.

Educational & research partners

Use the survey's data streams for teaching, citizen-science programs, or minor-planet and transient research.

Companies & sponsors

Support hardware expansion, hosting, or processing infrastructure — and help scale a growing, open sky-survey network.

Interested in the project?

Whether you'd like to follow along, contribute a telescope, or explore a partnership — we'd like to hear from you.

Get in touch Back to the idea