What's in our skies?

Observational Citizen Science of Earth's atmosphere and beyond.

Our vision

Facilitate a citizen science project

to observe phenomena in the skies 24/7 and provide high-quality results and analysis – available to everyone

Develop hardware and software with and for the project community

under MIT and Creative Commons licenses

Support the development and operation of a global network

of sky observation stations to provide global live sky situational awareness

What we do

credit: Paul/France 2023

We provide a community platform, tools and support to all people interested in observing the skies for stars, meteors, satellites, planes, drones, weather phenomena, birds, UAPs or anything else that happens in our atmosphere and low Earth orbit.

We already support the Discord channel the UAP Tracking Forum  for the community of UAP trackers with over 2,200 members.

Together with and for the community we develop hardware and software for an affordable 24/7 citizen sky observatory that can detect, track, identify and analyze any aerial phenomena.

The Sky360 station

Since a sky observing station will be outdoors 24/7, the sensitive electronics must be protected from all weather conditions. Since there are no good off-the-shelf solutions for this purpose, we have developed and are further developing an enclosure for the Sky360  community, that is available for purchase here.

Learn more
Sky 360 Station

UAP detection in action

EXAMPLE #1

Object falling from the sky

credit: Aaron/Alaska 2021

EXAMPLE #2

UAP above Houston (#1)

credit: Adam/Texas 2021

EXAMPLE #3

UAP above Houston (#2)

credit: Adam/Texas 2021

How we do it

For our Sky360 citizen science project, we set 5 preconditions:

Open source hardware development under Creative Commons License

Open source software development under MIT-License

Open source data generation

Management and support of the global Sky360 R&D community

System based on affordable, harmonized hardware for DIY

Worldmap of sky awareness stations

Sky Awareness Stations

● Sky360 - stationeers, developers

Development

At Sky360, we have two parallel development efforts—hardware and software—that combine to engineer the observation station and its underlying functionality. Volunteers are welcome to join any effort, given their skill-set.

Additionally, we're always graciously seeking funding and manpower to test components. If you're interested in becoming a contributor, you can join us on Discord or Patreon. Any help provided by volunteers or Patrons is greatly appreciated.

Managing Team

Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)

Our team

As an organization, Sky360 operates with two core teams consisting of accomplished scientists, engineers, developers, and more.

Our management team handles all Sky 360 operations, records-keeping, and legal matters while the Scientific Advisory Board guides all scientific endeavors.

Learn more about our team

Support, partnership & funding

As Sky360 is a global citizen science project with  and for  the community—it needs your engagement.

You can engage with us either by joining our discussions in the UAP Tracking Forum, by setting up your own Sky360 station, or by joining one of our development teams and contributing your expertise.

You can collaborate with us scientifically by co-developing and sharing data as well as helping us cover the costs of test hardware, communications, web and cloud space.

Get involved

Join us on the Discord server UAP Tracking Forum, where we meet to discuss new topics on research, development and science in the field of observational citizen science of aerial phenomena.

Here you also find friends, who are building their tracking stations.


Join the forum

Open source software development

Development of Sky360 software is done by several teams.

Click the button, if you want to contribute and join one of our teams.


Join the dev teams

Open source hardware development

Development of Sky360 hardware is done by several teams.

Click the button, if you want to contribute and join one of our teams.


Join the dev teams

Your donations help

We are developing hard- and software and sometimes we need test equipment that cost money.

Therefore we kindly ask our supporters to contribute on Patreon to cover test equipment as well as organizational costs.


Patreon

5 levels of patronship

Our benchmark for optical tracking

Because analysis software and AI require high quality data, we need to track fast moving events in Earth's atmosphere and low orbit with a minimum video resolution of 3-4 px for each event. Our benchmark is to detect, track and identify the ISS. The space station moves at a distance of 422km (250 mi), at a speed of 7.66km/s (28k km/h, 17.4k mph) and is visible for around 2 minutes (depending on the location).

Detection, Tracking and Triangulation

Hardware development.

To achieve the required resolution, a combination of an AllSkyCam (fisheye) and a PTF (pan-tilt-focus) camera is required. The ASC monitors the sky 24/7 and registers everything that moves in the sky as an event (aircraft, drone, bird, etc.). An initial rough analysis of each event determines whether to activate the PTF or other sensors. The PTF then focuses on the particular event, tracks it, and analyzes the now 30x more detailed event.

All hardware components we use, such as cameras, passive radar, temperature gauges, geophones, etc. must be available worldwide and off-the-shelf. At Sky360 we search, buy and test different options, currently for the combination of the ASC and the PTF. Our goal is to find the best price for the quality we need and to share our findings with the community.

Our curated list of recommended hardware products can be found here.

All future additions and developments from Sky360 will be compatible with existing hardware purchased on previous SkyHubs' recommendation.

Software development.

The software will cover various functionalities.

The core part is the tracker with image processing, a neural network (NN) with a machine learning (ML) based identifier and prioritizer, as well as a messaging system for all connected sensors.

For the connected sensors we first focus on the PTF for guiding, vector-ahead tracking and production of high resolution video data.

Currently all stations data is collected and stored locally. However, we plan to develop a software/AI for a cloud service that can aggregate event data from all active stations. The analysis will include additional external data such as air traffic, weather, etc.

The first version of our open source Sky360 software is scheduled for release in 2023.

Hardware costs.

We recognize that the cost of our Sky360 citizen science project must be as low as possible. Therefore, we recommend a modular system. Start with basic equipment and add more sensors later. Currently the range is US$ 1,500 - 5,000. All details you can find here.

To reduce costs, you can share a Sky360 station with friends, workmates or neighbors, because one station covers a radius of 30km (18.6 mi). And you can all access the collected data.
If budget allows, you can observe an even larger area along with other sky observing stations to get an even bigger picture. For a small town only 3-4 stations are needed and with only 9 stations you can cover the sky over all of Los Angeles!

Think about this: 
It only takes 150,000 stations and everyone can observe the sky around the world – almost seamlessly!