News
Project updates, expedition reports and decisions from the Union, newest first.
2026
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ASRU is formally founded
On November 7 all twelve members adopted the bylaws and elected the first Council. The Astral Survey Research Union now exists as a formal association.
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A first catalog of defects on digitized plates
The Plate Archive Project has published its first labeled dataset, a trained classifier, and a technical note describing both.
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Founding Assembly set for November 7 in Portland
The comment period on the bylaws has closed. All members are invited to vote on them and elect the first Council on November 7.
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Totality in Spain, then four nights on La Palma
Five members watched the total solar eclipse of August 12 from near Soria and then spent four nights imaging under the protected skies of La Palma.
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Draft bylaws open for comment
ASRU is preparing to become a formal organization. A draft of the bylaws is now with members for ten weeks of comment.
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trailmask v0.1: an open satellite-trail model
Our first open-source model finds satellite trails in wide-field images so they can be masked before analysis.
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Back from the Island of Hawaiʻi
Five members spent a week on the Island of Hawaiʻi for ASRU’s first expedition. Three of four nights were clear.
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The member image pipeline is open for submissions
Members can now submit their own images for calibration, plate solving and quality checks. The method is described in our first technical note.
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Starting the Plate Archive Project
Our first research program will apply image classification to digitized photographic plates from Harvard’s DASCH archive.
2025
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Seven weeks in, three working groups
ASRU now has eight members, seven of them in the Portland area. To keep things manageable we are splitting the work into three groups.
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An open call for sky-image volunteers
Sirio Vega Luna is looking for people who want to apply machine learning to public astronomical images, as volunteers and in the open.
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