Creative Commons Astrophotography
Have you ever wanted to experiment with astrophotography but can’t swallow the cost of gear? Don’t want to stay up all night? Just don’t have the time to learn all hardware but want to edit and experiment with images? Do you live in the light domes of massive cities and the associated light pollution thereof? We know what that is like, but we want to help people like you still enjoy this amazing hobby and we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign to help make it so!
What is this “creative commons”?
Creative Commons is a license supported by the Open Source community that allows us to publish everything we gather in a way that you can use the data how you see fit. Do you want to use our data for research? Sure! Go for it! Do you want to process your own images? Print it on mugs? Shirts? Put it on your blog? Your social media? Sure! We want to open astrophotography to more people to be creative, experimental, and analytical to more data and we want this to happen with extraordinarily little restrictions. All we ask is that you credit us for the source of this data.
Why a crowd funding campaign?
Astrophotography has been a saving grace for me through COVID. It’s allowed me to find something to do to explore our cosmos and see the universe from the comfort of my own home. I want to be able to share this with a broader audience – not just for those who can afford telescopes and associated gear who may benefit from our data – but to those who can’t afford or those who simply want to learn how to image process and create their own works of art with our observational data.
I hope with the campaign, I can gauge if there is enough interest in this and to offset the costs of this huge effort & ambition of mine.
I work in Tech for my day job and Open Source has been a critical success in my life and career. I’d like to be able to do the same for Astronomy and Astrophotography data. Being able to learn, experiment and test on my own with Open Source software has given me the chance of an amazing career. I’d like to be able to share this data in hopes it can help others!
Risks?
We already own all the gear and we have everything automated – this crowdfunding campaign will simply help us offset the cost of moving to dark skies and share the data with our contributors and if we reach our goals and stretch goals – share the data with the world. Anyone who contributes to the campaign will be rewarded with access to our data in direct downloads regardless of it being published on our blog and made available publicly.
If we reach our goals and stretch goals, we’ll be able to afford to open it up to the world.
What’s in it for you or me?
For me, I get to know that something I’m passionate about is being shared with the world for all to enjoy.
For you, if you support our campaign you get the selected crowdfunding benefit and if we reach our goals (and our stretch goals), the benefit is still there but more altruistic. You get to join me in being someone who is opening access to such data to all and we’ll all know we
With your support, we can move from relying on annoying ads to help fund this project to just helping each other.
How Can I Help?
If you have any other ideas for assisting in these efforts, please reach out and contact us.
Example Data
This data is from our prior setup and telescope, but you can get an idea of some of what we would like to be able to offer.
In addition to offering the processed images and the calibrated masters available to download, contributors will get access to individual sub exposures and calibration frames.
Not only will we provide all data from dark bortle2 skies, we’ll screen record our image processing and share that with all our contributors to show step-by-step how we processed the data!
For those who are completely new to it all but want to “drink from the firehose” – We have a limited set of “how the sausage is made” sessions we’re we’ll work with you one on one to show you everything about astrophotography. This will be a very comprehensive hands on “live telescope” over the internet sessions, Q&A and fully collaborative effort.
Thank you!
We hope you can join us on this adventure and help us achieve our goals. If not, at least we know we tried, and we’ll publish what we can!
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