About Starbook
Photons captured
Real data from a real sky. Processing is welcome; generative-AI pictures are not what Starbook is for.
Your data and its licence
You choose a licence for the picture and another for the data. The credit line travels with each.
Private by default
Your username is your identity. Your site's location is rounded to 0.1° unless you choose otherwise.
Free for now
2 GB free. Paid tiers come later, built so that nothing you share now is taken away.
What Starbook is
Starbook is where a finished astrophoto goes: the picture, the session behind it, the processing behind it and, if you want to share it, the data. Any rig is welcome; smart telescopes first, Seestar and DwarfLab first among those.
Starbook is free for now: 2 GB per account, room for years of smart-scope pictures and the stacked data behind them.
Astro Sidekick
It is made by the people behind Astro Sidekick, a desktop app that processes smart-telescope sessions with Siril. Publishing from the app will be one click; uploading from the browser works just as well.
Once you have it, connect it from Settings → Connected apps and publish straight from the app.
It is not out yet; until it is, everything on Starbook works from the browser: upload a picture.
Credits and attributions
Target catalogue: OpenNGC by Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), with names, distances and discoverers from Wikidata (CC0).
Plate solving: astrometry.net (Lang, Hogg, Mierle, Blanton and Roweis 2010), run on Starbook's own server, with index files built from the Two Micron All Sky Survey.
This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.
Annotations: deep-sky objects from OpenNGC by Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), common names from Wikidata (CC0); a few object positions and sizes corrected or added from the catalogues of Sharpless (1959), Lynds (1965) and Barnard (1927) and from SIMBAD, all served by CDS, Strasbourg (this site has made use of the SIMBAD database and the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France); star designations, spectral types, colours and parallaxes from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Edition (Hoffleit and Warren 1991, via CDS V/50); star names from the IAU Working Group on Star Names; faint stars from UCAC4, the fourth U.S. Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (Zacharias et al. 2013, AJ 145, 44), via CDS I/322A, with the APASS (AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey) and 2MASS magnitudes it carries.