About

The people and support behind ASAS-SN Sky Patrol V3, and how we handle requests to the service.

ASAS-SN#

The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) images the whole sky about every night with 20 telescopes on five mounts in Hawaii, Chile, South Africa and Texas, hosted by the Las Cumbres Observatory network. Sky Patrol V3 is operated by the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy and The Ohio State University.

Team#

Benjamin Shappee

University of Hawaiʻi · Institute for Astronomy

Sky Patrol V3 and ASAS-SN science

Website ↗

Portrait: University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy

Curt Dodds

University of Hawaiʻi · Institute for Astronomy

Computing infrastructure

GitHub & projects ↗

Christopher Kochanek

The Ohio State University · Department of Astronomy

ASAS-SN co-principal investigator

Website ↗

Krzysztof Stanek

The Ohio State University · Department of Astronomy

ASAS-SN co-principal investigator

Website ↗

Sky Patrol builds on the work of the wider ASAS-SN collaboration, including the teams behind earlier Sky Patrol releases.

Funding and acknowledgements#

Support for Sky Patrol V3. We gratefully acknowledge the State of Hawaiʻi for salary support through the University of Hawaiʻi, enabling the work behind this service. V3 is hosted at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy.

Support for ASAS-SN. The survey and its public data products have been made possible by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF5490 and GBMF10501), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G202114192), and the U.S. National Science Foundation, including science support through AST-2407206.

We also acknowledge support for the survey’s development and expansion from Ohio State’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, Peking University, the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA), and the Villum Foundation. We thank Las Cumbres Observatory and its staff for hosting and supporting the telescope network.

These acknowledgments recognize support across the survey’s history. See the ASAS-SN project page for the collaboration’s funding acknowledgment.

To cite Sky Patrol in a paper, see Citing Sky Patrol.

Privacy#

We use private operational logs to understand demand, improve the service, enforce fair-use limits and investigate errors or abuse. We do not use advertising trackers.

• Requests and sky positions. Server logs record IP addresses, request times, requested paths or objects, response status and performance. Structured API logs include validated RA/Dec and search radius for coordinate searches; a star ID or Solar System object name is not itself a requested sky position.
• Approximate place. We use a local IP-location database to estimate country, region and city. These estimates may describe a VPN, institution or internet provider, and are not a person’s precise location. Visitor IPs are not sent to a geolocation service. IP Geolocation by DB-IP, using DB-IP Lite under CC BY 4.0.
• Accounts and security. Accounts use secure session and CSRF cookies. Application access logs do not contain passwords, recovery codes, API tokens, cookies or request bodies. Logs are restricted to service operators.
• Optional provider sign-in. When enabled, Google or Apple verifies your login and shares a provider identifier and verified email address with us. We request no access to your mail, contacts or other account data. Provider sign-in does not grant team-verified access.
• On your device. Your browser stores your colour theme, dismissed banners, recently viewed objects and the fastest image mirror. Clear the browser’s site data to remove these preferences.
• Other services. Star names are sent by your browser to the CDS Sesame resolver. Sky images load from public image servers, including CDS, MAST, ESA, CSIRO and China-VO; those providers receive the requests needed to supply their results.

Software and data credits#

• Sky images: Aladin Lite 3.8.2 (CDS, Strasbourg), with Pan-STARRS1 and DSS2 HiPS surveys.
• Name resolution: Sesame (CDS).
• Solar-system orbits and names: the Minor Planet Center and JPL's Small-Body Database.
• Typeface: Open Sans, under the SIL Open Font License.

The licence wording for the bundled Aladin Lite (GPL or LGPL) is being confirmed.

Contact#

For questions about Sky Patrol V3, contact Benjamin Shappee. For a request problem, include the request_id from the error message; never send a password, recovery code or API token.

Sky Patrol V2#

The previous version is Sky Patrol V2. V2 and V3 star ids are different numbers; search V3 by name or position.