Hi, I'm Mario Keller
IT professional, astrophotographer and tech journalist — and the person behind Smart Sky Survey.
Three passions, one project
💻IT
I've worked in IT for more than 30 years — long enough to see many technologies come and go, and to learn that the interesting part is usually how things fit together. At its heart, Smart Sky Survey is an IT project: many devices, one plan and a lot of data.
🔭Astrophotography
For over seven years I've been photographing the night sky — star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, the Sun and the Moon — with classic telescopes and cameras, and more recently with smart telescopes. A telescope, a camera and a lot of patience.
✍️Tech journalism
For ten years I've written as a freelance tech journalist — reportages, background pieces, hardware tests and how-tos for outlets such as Golem.de, heise and CHIP. My topics: new technology, gadgets, astronomy and retro computing — and above all the people behind them.
More than a year in the making
The idea had been on my mind for more than a year. Smart telescopes have become small, affordable and fully remote-controllable — so why not let several of them work together as one instrument and survey a large patch of sky, night after night, on a fixed cadence?
For a long time it stayed a thought experiment. Now I've finally started building it: the tiling engine, the control software and this website are the first steps toward a working array.
Science isn't only for professionals
I strongly believe that "normal" people can do real science. With today's equipment, amateurs can collect data that is genuinely useful for research — from tracking asteroids and comets to spotting transient events such as supernovae.
Smart Sky Survey is my attempt to make that easier: open, independent of any single brand, and designed so that anyone with a smart telescope can contribute to something bigger than a single night's image.