Astro
Looking for asteroids in the sky nobody is paid to watch.
Photos of one patch of sky, shown one after another. Stars stay put. Anything that moves is a candidate.
The night, hour by hour
Each block is one field. Four photos of 300 seconds, about six minutes apart, then the next field. Two fields fit in an hour. The first block is the control: a known asteroid the pipeline must recover before an empty field means anything.
Money in, hours out
Every purchase funds a share of a field and is observed in the name of the address that paid. Every hour of telescope has a receipt: the SPCX sold, the transaction, the invoice.
Where the telescope is pointed, and why
Fields are chosen near opposition, off the ecliptic crowd and the galactic plane, high enough for the whole set, and outside the big surveys' footprints that night. The map is the queue; the table is the reasons.
What has been published
Every set, solved or not. Every line sent to the Minor Planet Center in its own 80-column format. Every empty field, with the magnitude down to which it was empty. Public domain, no account needed.
Known-object recovery
Point at a catalogued asteroid and recover it within one arcsecond of where the orbit says it is.
Astrometric residuals
How far each submitted position sits from the MPC's fitted orbit, copied here as it comes, good and bad.
Limiting magnitude
The faintest known object recovered per telescope per night. It is what "nothing there" means, in numbers.
What this commits to, and how an hour is spent
Short on purpose. The long version is the code, which is public, and the record above, which is the only proof that matters.
Known-object check
Every mover is cross-matched with the MPC before anyone here calls it anything.
Two-night rule
Nothing is a candidate until a second night recovers it. One night is a hint.
Published misses
A field with nothing moving stays on the record, photos and all. Empty is a measurement.
Measured cost
Every hour with its price, its receipt, and the SPCX sold to pay for it.
Repeatable
Raw FITS, plate solutions, timestamps, software versions. All downloadable.
Credit is not ours
The MPC decides who discovered what. This page reports what the MPC says.
Most of the sky, most nights, is watched by nobody. The large surveys cover the bright, the fast and the near. Between their footprints and below their cadence there are fields a half-metre telescope reaches at magnitude 20 that no one points at on a given night. Anything faint moving through one of them goes unrecorded.
This project rents that telescope time one hour at a time and reports every measurement to the Minor Planet Center, where it becomes part of the public record whether or not it turns out to be new. Most of what it measures will already be known. Those measurements tighten orbits, and they are reported too.
Why SpaceX stock. The fee has to be held in something. Holding it in the stock of the company putting the most mass into orbit is the joke, and it is also the treasury: it sits on-chain, countable, and only the slice the next hour costs ever leaves. Nothing about this is a partnership. SpaceX has never heard of it.
Book the hour
The agent sells only the SPCX the hour costs and buys telescope points. Both transactions are linked in the ledger before the telescope moves.
Pick a field
Near opposition, off the galactic plane, above the horizon for the whole set, not in tonight's survey footprints.
Take four photos
300 seconds each, unguided, about six minutes apart. Telescope, MPC code and every timestamp recorded with the files.
Map them
Each photo is plate-solved against Gaia, so every pixel has a sky coordinate to a fraction of an arcsecond.
Find what moved
Sources are extracted per photo. Anything present in every photo at a consistent drift, and absent from the star catalogue, is flagged.
Ask the MPC
Every flagged mover goes through MPChecker. Known objects get their designation. Unknown ones are held, not announced.
Report, then follow up
Positions of known objects are submitted at once. An unknown mover is not called anything until a second night, paid the same way, recovers it.
Each step priced, each step a receipt
Costs are what the project will spend. A step unlocks when its cost is covered; when it is paid, the receipt is published with the date. measured is a real invoice, estimated is the telescope's public rate, no compute costs only time, not ours cannot be bought, only earned.
Rungs five and six are shown so the distance is honest. Numbering takes several oppositions, which means years. Naming is proposed by whoever the MPC credits and decided by the IAU. If that is ever us, it will say so here, with the circular that says it.