Astra Academy and Astra Explorer are where most students first meet us. Underneath the Astra Sky Project, we're also prototyping a handful of tools related to protecting the night sky. Here's what's on the drawing board.
Type in an address and scroll back through time. You'll see historical satellite imagery of the area, an estimate of how its sky darkness has changed, and roughly how many visible stars have been lost. Most people have never actually seen this happen where they live — this tool would show it to them directly.
This tool combines weather, moon phase, air quality, and local light pollution into a real-time visibility score for wherever you are — something like "Palo Alto tonight: 28 out of 100, about 450 visible stars." It's meant to replace the guesswork of deciding whether it's worth stepping outside.
Rocket launches are becoming routine, and this tool would track their emissions alongside orbital debris and reentry events. Space is being commercialized faster than most people realize, and almost nobody is tracking what that costs environmentally.
Students and stargazers anywhere could upload sky photos, sky-quality-meter readings, or notes on Milky Way visibility. We'd turn that into a live, crowd-sourced map of dark skies, and track how it changes over time.
An interactive way to explore how climate change shows up in astronomy data: rising temperatures affecting atmospheric clarity, wildfire smoke disrupting observatories, glacier retreat and long-term shifts visible in the data astronomers already collect.
A dashboard tracking major observatories worldwide against the risks closing in on them: wildfires, urban light spill, water scarcity, and encroaching development. The goal is a simple risk ranking that shows which observatories need protecting most urgently.
Tell it where you're starting from and how far you're willing to drive, and it finds the best nearby dark-sky spots, checked against weather, moon phase, air quality, and light pollution maps.
Email us and we'll figure out where you fit.