People
ASRU has 12 members, most of them in and around Portland, Oregon. Each avatar is a small constellation generated from the member’s name.
Council
Elected at the Founding Assembly on November 7, 2026 for a term ending at the ordinary General Assembly in 2028. The Council runs the Union and leads its research programs.
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Sirio Vega Luna
President, Founder
Portland, Oregon, United States
Sirio started ASRU in October 2025 while studying in Portland, after a summer spent re-processing archival sky images with open-source tools. He was born and raised in Spain. He coordinates the Union’s projects and expeditions and still runs a good share of the overnight processing jobs himself.
Focus: Project coordination, image processing
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Theo Nakashima
Vice-President, Satellite Trails lead
Portland, Oregon, United States
Theo is a software engineer who grew up in Hilo, on the Island of Hawaiʻi. He was the first person to answer Sirio’s open call, leads the development of trailmask, and organized the Union’s March 2026 trip to Hawaiʻi.
Focus: Machine learning, trailmask
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Owen McAllister
Secretary, Plate Archive Project lead
Portland, Oregon, United States
Owen works in archives administration and has belonged to a local astronomy club for over a decade. He leads the Plate Archive Project and, as Secretary, keeps the Union’s minutes, membership register and bylaws.
Focus: Historical plates, records, bylaws
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Hana Kowalczyk
Treasurer, Member Image Pipeline lead
Portland, Oregon, United States
Hana is a physics graduate student working on detector calibration. She leads the member image pipeline and, as Treasurer, manages ASRU’s small budget, which is funded entirely by member contributions.
Focus: Calibration, budget
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Mareike Schulte
Council member, Technical and research adviser
Heidelberg, Germany
Mareike leads several projects at a professional astronomy institute in Germany. She found Sirio’s open call on a forum in November 2025 and has supported ASRU ever since, in a personal capacity: she reviews our models before release, advises on data and instruments, and points us to professional tools and public data sets. ASRU has no agreement with her employer.
Focus: Model review, data and instruments
Members
Members take part in our programs, events and expeditions in their spare time.
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Davi Moreira Castro
Website, code review
Portland, Oregon, United States
Davi is a web developer and a licensed amateur radio operator. He built this website and reviews much of the code the Union publishes.
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Kenta Morioka
Storage and compute
Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Kenta is a backend engineer. In his spare time he looks after the storage and compute that ASRU’s pipelines run on: donated cloud credits, a shared object store and one very loud workstation.
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Ishita Venkatesan
Plate labeling, history of astronomy
Beaverton, Oregon, United States
Ishita is interested in the history of astronomical photography and has labeled more plate cutouts than anyone else in the Union.
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Aisha Rahman
Outreach, public events
Vancouver, Washington, United States
Aisha studies environmental science and organizes monthly public night-sky walks in her neighborhood. She helps run ASRU’s public events.
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Camila Rojas Ferrer
Observing, image submissions
Eugene, Oregon, United States
Camila grew up in La Serena, Chile, under some of the clearest skies in the world, and is now a graduate student in Eugene. She is one of the most regular contributors to the member image pipeline.
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Freya Lindqvist
Segmentation models
Seattle, Washington, United States
Freya works on computer vision for medical imaging and contributes to trailmask in her spare time, mostly on training and evaluation.
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Tomás Herrera Díaz
Astrophotography, calibration frames
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
Tomás is an astrophotographer on Tenerife and an old acquaintance of Sirio’s family. He takes part online, wrote the Union’s guide to calibration frames, and planned the La Palma part of the August 2026 trip.