This is the message that started ASRU. It was first posted on October 18, 2025, on a Portland community board and in several online astronomy forums. It is reproduced here as it was written.
Hi everyone,
My name is Sirio. I’m a student in Portland, originally from Spain, and I have spent most of this past summer doing something slightly obsessive: downloading public sky images and running them through machine-learning models to see what they pick up.
The images are out there. Observatories and survey teams have released millions of frames, and some archives have digitized photographic plates going back more than a century. Most of this material has been looked at by people once, if at all, for one purpose. Modern image models are very good at noticing things, and they are cheap to run.
What I don’t have is a team. I’m looking for people who would like to:
- help label and review images (no experience needed, I’ll write a guide),
- write or review Python code,
- share images from their own telescopes, or
- help organize all of this.
The plan is simple. Everything we build will be open source. Everything we label will be published. Nobody gets paid and nobody pays. If it grows, we’ll give it a proper structure with members and elected officers, but for now it’s an experiment.
I’ve been calling it the Astral Survey Research Union, mostly because I liked the initials. If you’re interested, reply here or write to me. Tell me where you are and what you’d like to do.
Clear skies, Sirio