CrowdSky

Your observations. Stacked in the cloud. Shared with science.

A free cloud stacking service for ZWO Seestar users — and a growing time-domain archive for the astronomy community.

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Observe for science tonight

Pick a citizen-science project and your location to get ten high-priority targets for your Seestar tonight — served live by our sister service, CrowdSci.

The CrowdSky Network

Live stats from the growing archive. Every frame counts.

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Seestars Contributing
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Raw Frames Uploaded
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Stacked Images
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Total Observation Time
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Unique Objects Observed
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Registered Observers

Seestar Leaderboard

Top contributing telescopes by stacked chunk-frames

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All-Sky Coverage

Every dot is a stacked observation in the archive

Two missions. One platform.

Cloud storage for observers

Upload your raw Seestar sub-exposures and get back deep, publication-quality stacked images — automatically grouped by target and time. No desktop software required, no storage limits to worry about. Your data, processed and archived in the cloud.

Citizen science for astronomy

Every observation you contribute feeds into a growing time-domain archive — a resource for tracking variable stars, discovering transient events, and building long-baseline photometry datasets. Your backyard telescope becomes a node in a global network.

How it works

Three steps from raw frames to stacked science data.

1

Upload

Select your raw .fit files from a night's session. CrowdSky reads the FITS headers, identifies your target, and groups exposures into 15-minute time bins automatically.

2

Stack

Our stacking worker aligns and combines your sub-exposures using proven algorithms. Track the progress of every job in real time from your dashboard.

3

Explore

Browse your stacked frames on an interactive all-sky map, filter by date and object, preview thumbnails, and download publication-ready FITS files.

Built for the Seestar community

The ZWO Seestar has brought deep-sky imaging to hundreds of thousands of new observers worldwide. CrowdSky turns this flood of data into something greater — a shared, searchable archive where every 10-second sub-exposure contributes to our understanding of the changing sky.

Operated by astronomers at the University of Vienna, CrowdSky bridges the gap between casual backyard observing and professional time-domain research.

Funding & Acknowledgments

CrowdSky has been funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) — Grant ID 10.47379/DARE25064.

Project Summary

CrowdSky seizes a remarkable new opportunity in modern astronomy: the emergence of a vast, global, and largely untapped stream of homogeneous time-domain data produced every night by tens of thousands of mass-market smart telescopes in the hands of amateur astronomers. We are developing a sustainable Data Platform comprising (1) a robust bulk-data archive built on the AstroWISE system, capable of ingesting and serving standardised stacked observations at scale; (2) a science-metrics database optimised for time-domain parameters such as light curves, astrometric shifts, and transient signatures; and (3) a visualisation layer to explore the rapidly growing temporal and spatial sky coverage. The outcome is a new scientific asset that channels worldwide citizen observations into professional astrophysics and planetary defence, complementing large survey telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and turning a global hobby into a coordinated, distributed observatory.

Kurzbeschreibung (Deutsch)

CrowdSky erschließt eine neue Chance für die Astronomie: Weltweit erzeugen Zehntausende Smart-Teleskope jede Nacht große Mengen homogener Zeitreihendaten — mit einer Himmelsabdeckung und Kadenz, die professionellen Großanlagen nahekommt. CrowdSky macht diesen bislang ungenutzten Datenschatz erstmals wissenschaftlich zugänglich. Dafür entwickeln wir eine Plattform mit drei Kernmodulen: einem skalierbaren Archiv für standardisierte Beobachtungen, einer Datenbank für zentrale Zeitreihenparameter wie Lichtkurven und Positionsänderungen sowie Visualisierungstools zur Analyse der Himmelsabdeckung. Ein Desktop-Client ermöglicht die unkomplizierte Verarbeitung und Übertragung der Daten. So entsteht ein global zugängliches System, das Citizen-Science-Beobachtungen in die professionelle Astrophysik und den Planetenschutz integriert — und ein weltweites Hobby in ein vernetztes Observatorium verwandelt.

Operated by the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Vienna in collaboration with the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen.

Ready to contribute?

Join CrowdSky for free and start uploading tonight.

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