Data and image policy

Adopted by the Council on November 7, 2026.

What we publish

• Code is released under the MIT license.
• Datasets, labels, catalogs and model weights are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), unless a data source requires otherwise.
• Text and original graphics on this website are released under CC BY 4.0, unless marked otherwise.

To credit us, name the Astral Survey Research Union and link to the page or dataset you used. Technical notes include a suggested citation.

Images submitted by members

Members keep the copyright in every image they submit to the member image pipeline. By submitting, a member gives ASRU a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free permission to store and process the image, to use it to train and test models, and to publish measurements and small cutouts derived from it.

Full-size images are only published with the member’s explicit permission, and always with their name. A member can withdraw an image at any time by writing to research@asru.org. We will remove it from our stores and from future releases; data already published cannot be recalled.

Data we use from others

We follow the acknowledgment requirements of every data source we use.

DASCH

This work has made use of data provided by Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH). The DASCH project at Harvard is grateful for partial support from NSF grants AST-0407380, AST-0909073 and AST-1313370.

Gaia

This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.