With a browser, anyone can classify real survey data in a few minutes
Telescopes now collect far more images than astronomers can look at. Many projects put them in front of volunteers, mostly through the Zooniverse, run by the University of Oxford and the Adler Planetarium. No experience is needed: each project trains you in a few screens, and several people look at each image so mistakes average out. Volunteers have found planets, brown dwarfs and new kinds of galaxies this way, and are named in the papers. These projects were running in 2026:
| Project | What you do | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Zoo | Sort galaxies by shape from survey images | Families and classrooms |
| Planet Hunters TESS | Spot the dips in starlight that mark a passing planet in TESS data | Students and adults |
| Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 | Flip through infrared images to find moving brown dwarfs and a possible ninth planet | Teens and adults |
| Kilonova Seekers | Check new transients from the GOTO telescopes in near real time | Teens and adults |
| Rubin Alert Explorers | Look over alerts from the Rubin Observatory's new sky survey | Teens and adults |
| The Daily Minor Planet | Confirm new asteroid candidates in the Catalina Sky Survey's daily images | Students and adults |
| Disk Detective | Find stars with dusty disks where planets may be forming | Students and adults |
| Gaia Vari | Classify variable stars found by the Gaia spacecraft | Students and adults |
| Radio Meteor Zoo | Mark meteor echoes in radio data from Belgium | Families and classrooms |
| Aurora Zoo | Classify auroral shapes in all-sky camera images | Families and classrooms |
| Globe at Night | Match the night sky to star charts to measure light pollution | Families and classrooms, outdoors |
| Exoplanet Watch, data option | Measure exoplanet transits from archived telescope images with NASA's EXOTIC software | Students and adults |
Projects close when their data are done and new ones open every few months; the Zooniverse project list is always current. For classrooms, Galaxy Zoo, Radio Meteor Zoo and Globe at Night work for all ages.
With a telescope, amateurs make measurements professionals still rely on
Some astronomy needs many observers spread across the world, watching on short notice. That is where amateurs with modest equipment do work professional observatories cannot. The common thread is timing and brightness: when something happened and how bright it was, recorded carefully.
| Program | What you measure | What you need | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAVSO | Variable star brightness estimates, by eye or camera | Binoculars and up | The American Association of Variable Star Observers has collected amateur observations since 1911; its database is used by professionals worldwide. |
| IOTA occultations | Timing a star as an asteroid passes in front of it | Small telescope, video camera, GPS time | A line of observers across the shadow path maps the asteroid's size and shape. Predictions and team planning use the free Occult Watcher software. |
| Exoplanet Watch | Timing exoplanet transits | Telescopes as small as 4 inches, with a camera | Run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Your timings keep predicted transit times fresh for Hubble and Webb. |
| Unistellar network | Coordinated campaigns: transits, occultations, comets, asteroid flybys | A Unistellar smart telescope | Run with the SETI Institute; the telescope's owners join campaigns from home. |
| American Meteor Society | Fireball reports and meteor counts | Your eyes | Many reports of one fireball let the society work out its path and where any meteorites fell. |
| Minor Planet Center | Asteroid and comet positions | Telescope, camera and an observatory code | The clearing house for every asteroid and comet observation. Advanced: positions must be measured to a fraction of an arcsecond. |
Start with a local astronomy club: most of these programs have members in clubs who will show you how.
Most big sky surveys are open to anyone, and a laptop is enough to use them
The data behind most astronomy papers is public. Space missions and ground surveys release it, usually free and without registration, through archives that answer web searches and queries from code. The tools are free too: Python with the astroquery and lightkurve packages covers most archives, and TOPCAT and Aladin let you browse catalogs and images without writing code. Here is what is open, and how to get it, as of November 2026:
| Dataset | What is in it | Open to anyone? | How to get it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaia ESA | Positions, distances, motions and brightness of nearly 2 billion stars | Yes | Gaia Archive (web or ADQL queries), astroquery | Data Release 3 is current; Data Release 4, with 66 months of observations and light curves for every source, is due 2 December 2026 |
| TESS NASA | Light curves of millions of stars, sampled every few minutes | Yes | MAST portal; the lightkurve Python package | Plot a star's light curve and look for transits or flares |
| Kepler and K2 NASA | Four years of ultra-precise light curves of one field, then K2 along the ecliptic | Yes | MAST; lightkurve | The classic first exoplanet dataset |
| Hubble NASA and ESA | Images and spectra from 1990 on | Yes, after a 6-month exclusive period | MAST; ESA Hubble archive | Make your own color image from the raw frames |
| James Webb Space Telescope NASA, ESA and CSA | Infrared images and spectra | Yes, after up to 12 months; some programs are public at once | MAST, anonymous download once public | Process public Webb data into your own image |
| Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) SDSS collaboration | Images of a third of the sky and spectra of millions of stars, galaxies and quasars | Yes | SkyServer (web and SQL), Zora and Valis browsers | Data Release 20, July 2026, the 20th public release since 2003 |
| LAMOST China, National Astronomical Observatories | More than 30 million stellar spectra, the most of any survey | Yes, after a period for Chinese and partner astronomers | lamost.org (web, TAP queries); catalogs on VizieR | Data Release 13, more than 30 million spectra, went to Chinese and partner astronomers in March 2026 |
| DESI US Department of Energy | Spectra of millions of galaxies and quasars for mapping dark energy | Yes (Data Release 1) | data.desi.lbl.gov | Data Release 2, three years of the survey, is due by early 2027 |
| Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Caltech | The northern sky imaged every two nights since 2018 | Yes | IRSA (NASA/IPAC); light curves in the Time Series Tool; mirrored by China-VO | Data Release 24 came out January 2026; Data Release 25 is due January 2027 |
| Rubin Observatory alerts NSF and DOE | Up to 7 million alerts a night of anything that changed or moved | Yes: alerts and Minor Planet Center data | Public alert brokers such as ALeRCE, ANTARES, Fink and Lasair | Images and catalogs are limited to data-rights holders for 2 years; see below |
| Euclid ESA | Wide survey of a third of the sky, sharper than any ground-based survey | Yes, for public releases | ESA Euclid archive; IRSA | Quick releases Q1 (March 2025) and Q2 (June 2026) are public; Data Release 1 is coming in stages from late 2026 |
| WISE and NEOWISE NASA | All-sky infrared images and catalogs, 2009 to 2024 | Yes | IRSA | The data behind Backyard Worlds |
| NASA Exoplanet Archive NASA | Every confirmed exoplanet and its parameters | Yes | exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu (web, API) | Plot planet size against orbit for 6,000 worlds |
| Minor Planet Center and JPL Horizons IAU and NASA | Orbits and positions of every known asteroid and comet | Yes | minorplanetcenter.net; ssd.jpl.nasa.gov (web, API) | Predict where an asteroid will be tonight |
| DASCH Harvard College Observatory | Light curves of the whole sky from about 1880 to 1990, from 430,000 glass plates | Yes | daschlab Python package, web APIs, StarGlass | Look up how a star behaved a century ago |
| Solar data: SDO and SOHO NASA and ESA | The Sun imaged every few seconds since 2010 (SDO) and 1995 (SOHO) | Yes | Helioviewer.org; the Virtual Solar Observatory | Track sunspots or watch a flare at many wavelengths |
"Exclusive period" means the team that proposed an observation gets the data first; after that it is public. For Hubble that period is 6 months. For most Webb programs it is 12 months, though teams can choose less and some large programs are public immediately.
The Rubin Observatory is open in real time, but its images and catalogs are not open to everyone yet
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is running its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time and issued its first public alerts on 24 February 2026. Its data come in two kinds:
- Public to anyone, worldwide: the alerts, sent within about 60 seconds of each image for anything that brightened, faded or moved, and all asteroid and comet data, which go to the Minor Planet Center. Anyone may analyze and publish with them. The alerts reach the public through community brokers, which filter and classify them; ALeRCE, for example, offers a web portal, a Python client and an API.
- Limited to data-rights holders: the images and full catalogs on the Rubin Science Platform. Rights holders are scientists and students in the United States and Chile and named members of international partner teams. Most data become public 2 years after each release.
Without data rights, you can do time-domain science with the alerts, co-author papers with rights holders, or apply for data rights if the public routes are not enough. The Rubin Alert Explorers project on the Zooniverse is the easiest way to start.
A century of glass plates is now searchable, and AI is how people mine it
Before digital cameras, observatories photographed the sky on glass plates. Harvard College Observatory alone kept more than 500,000, covering the whole sky thousands of times from the 1880s to 1990. The DASCH project scanned them from the 2000s until March 2024, and its final release, Data Release 7 of December 2024, opened everything: about 200 terabytes of plate images and 16 terabytes of light curves, with no access restrictions. The daschlab Python package is the recommended way in. The StarGlass site shows the plates themselves and the logbooks of the women "computers" who studied them.
Old plates let you ask how a star behaved before anyone was watching: whether a star that flared last year had flared in 1920, or how a variable star's period has drifted over a century. With hundreds of thousands of plates and billions of measurements, that search is done by software. Machine learning sorts real changes from plate flaws, and the same methods run on modern surveys: the Rubin and ZTF alert brokers use trained classifiers to flag likely supernovae, variable stars and asteroids, and AI has helped find comets in ZTF data. Most of these tools are open source, and a laptop runs them on public data.
AI processing makes better pictures but invents detail, so keep it out of measurements
Image processing now leans on neural networks for noise removal, background flattening, star removal and sharpening, in tools such as GraXpert and the RC Astro plug-ins for PixInsight, and smart telescopes stack and clean images on board. For pretty pictures they are a real advance. For science they are a problem: a network trained on sharp images fills in what it expects to see. Comparisons against deeper images of the same objects show AI sharpening adding structure that is not there, and the developer of the StarTools software calls such output re-interpreted rather than deconvolved detail.
- For a picture to share: use any tool you like, and say which you used.
- For a measurement: brightness, position or timing to report to AAVSO, IOTA, Exoplanet Watch or the Minor Planet Center, work from calibrated, unprocessed frames, with darks, flats and bias, using photometry software such as the free Siril or the programs each project recommends. No AI denoising, sharpening or star removal.
A real discovery has a place to be reported
- A new supernova or other transient: the IAU's Transient Name Server.
- A new asteroid or comet, or positions of known ones: the Minor Planet Center.
- A possible nova or a bright new comet: the IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, after checking it is not already known.
- A variable star's behavior: the AAVSO.
- A fireball: the American Meteor Society or the International Meteor Organization.
Sources
- Rubin Observatory, Data access and analysis, Alerts and brokers, and Rubin data rights and amateur astronomers (October 2026); Rubin prompt products data policy.
- ESA Gaia mission news, Gaia Data Release 4 date announcement (7 May 2026).
- SDSS, Data Release 20 (30 July 2026).
- LAMOST Data Release 13 announcement, National Astronomical Observatories of China (March 2026); LAMOST DR11 catalogs, VizieR V/162.
- DESI Milky Way Survey backup program paper, arXiv:2505.17230 (Data Release 2 schedule).
- Zwicky Transient Facility public data releases and IRSA mission page (Data Release 24, January 2026).
- Euclid Consortium timeline (June 2026); ESA Euclid timeline.
- JWST documentation, Exclusive access period and Data rights.
- Williams, P. K. G. (2025), DASCH: Bringing 100+ years of photographic data into the 21st century and beyond, arXiv:2501.12977; DASCH news.
- NASA Exoplanet Watch; International Occultation Timing Association; Zooniverse project pages (2025 and 2026).
- StarTools forum, discussion of BlurXTerminator by I. Jager; Capella Observatory, remarks on AI in astrophoto processing (2026).