The Smart Sky Survey links several compact smart telescopes into one array that tiles a region of sky all night long — rebuilding the same mosaic on a configurable cadence (about once an hour, by default) so that anything that moves, brightens, or appears can be caught in the act.
Photos courtesy of ZWO / seestar.com, DWARFLAB / dwarflab.com, Vaonis / vaonis.com, and Unistellar / unistellar.com — smart telescope platforms this project is aiming to support.
Small telescopes, used together, can do something a single big telescope can't do easily: watch a wide area repeatedly, all night, without moving between completely different targets.
Several smart telescopes point at neighboring, slightly overlapping patches of sky at the same time — together they cover one large contiguous field, like tiles in a mosaic.
Each patch is exposed and stacked for 5–10 minutes. Then the whole array slews together to the next patch — tiling across the target region and looping back on a configurable cadence, about once an hour by default.
Because every patch gets revisited on that same cadence all night, asteroids, comets, satellites and transients reveal themselves by shifting or appearing between passes — or, with a longer loop, the survey trades that time series for a single wider pass across more sky.
There are two levels of tiling at play: the fixed arrangement of telescopes within the array, and the sequence of sky positions the whole array steps through over the night.
Because the array revisits every tile on each loop, each patch of sky builds up a time series over the night.
Time series — the same sky tile, imaged once per loop over six hours
The loop length — how long the array takes to step through the outer grid before looping back — is a configurable planning choice, not a fixed property of the system. It trades sky coverage against revisit cadence. Try it yourself in the survey simulator.
| Use case | Loop length | Time-series images / tile / night | Sky area surveyed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-sky survey | One loop per night (no revisit) | 1 — no time series | Maximum — the whole night, none of it spent revisiting |
| Wide-field survey | 90–120 min | Few (2–4) | Large — more tiles fit per (longer) loop |
| Standard survey (default) | ~60 min | Moderate (≈4–8) | Balanced — the original "mosaic of mosaics" cadence |
| Narrow-field / fast-cadence survey | Short (15–30 min) | Many (8–20+) | Small — fewer tiles fit per (shorter) loop |
Every telescope is leveled, polar-aligned for EQ tracking, and connected over ASCOM/Alpaca to the control host.
A precomputed list of sky tiles — generated from the target region, array arrangement, and field of view — is loaded and filtered for the night's twilight window and altitude limits.
The control host sends each telescope its own goto coordinate — offset from the array's shared center — so all scopes point at their tile of the current mosaic simultaneously.
Each scope exposes and stacks for 5–10 minutes, then the stacked frame is saved with a name that records the scope, tile, and cycle it belongs to.
The array advances to the next tile in the plan. After the last tile, it loops back to the first, so the whole region gets revisited on the configured loop length (~1 hour by default) until dawn.
Curious what actually running and monitoring a session would look like day to day? Click through a full project/session/telescope workflow — including a simulated session running live — built entirely as a showcase for contributors and supporters, with no backend behind it.
Every part of the array is controlled and coordinated in software, so the system scales from a couple of telescopes to a much larger array.
Smart telescopes that support EQ mode use it for multi-minute stacks, eliminating field rotation and keeping frame orientation consistent from tile to tile and night to night. Alt-az mode is supported too, with the limitations field rotation imposes on longer stacks.
Telescopes are driven through ASCOM Alpaca — an IP-based, scriptable standard — rather than the stock mobile app, so goto, exposure, and status can be orchestrated across the whole array from one place. Best for locally-owned, locally-networked units.
ZWO's own app supports remote control and time-limited device sharing between accounts — so a telescope owner anywhere can lend the project their Seestar for a night. This lowers the barrier to a bigger array: no hardware to buy, no local network to join, just a shared session for the night.
A coordinate-math tool computes per-telescope and per-tile RA/Dec targets from field of view, overlap percentage, and array arrangement (2×2, 3×2, and beyond), and builds the full night's tile plan in advance.
Every stacked frame is named and indexed by telescope, sky tile, and cycle — so images can be automatically grouped into time series for detection, or mosaicked into a full picture of the surveyed region.
The configurable revisit cadence is what makes the survey scientifically flexible — the same processing pipeline that builds a mosaic can also spot what changed between visits, when the chosen loop length produces a time series.
| Stage | What happens | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Per-tile stacking | Sub-exposures for each 5–10 minute block are combined into one clean frame. | Removes noise, boosts faint signal for each patch. |
| Time-series alignment | All visits of the same tile, at the configured loop cadence, are astrometrically registered to a common frame. | Makes frames directly comparable, cycle to cycle. |
| Blink / difference detection | Sequential frames are compared to flag anything that shifted or appeared. | Surfaces asteroid, comet, and transient candidates automatically. |
| Candidate vetting | Detections are cross-matched against known object catalogs. | Separates already-known objects from genuinely new finds. |
| Mosaic assembly | All tiles from one pass are combined into a single wide-field image. | Gives a full-region view of the sky and validates the tiling itself. |
Smart Sky Survey is an independent, non-commercial project — and it doesn't grow alone. These partners help turn the idea into a working array.
Maker of the DWARF smart telescopes
DWARFLAB supports the project with DWARF telescopes for the array and with technical help on device integration and remote control — a key step toward a survey that works across telescope brands.
dwarflab.com ↗Via PayPal, with a virtual coffee, with a DWARF mini at a partner discount — or by lending a telescope: every contribution brings more sky into view.
Whether you'd like to follow along, contribute a telescope, or explore a partnership — we'd like to hear from you.