About AstroRoom

AstroRoom is a darkroom for the universe — a tool for processing real telescope archives the way a photographer processes their own film.

What it is

Every image you see in AstroRoom is reconstructed from real FITS files — the same data professional astronomers use. The pipeline is transparent end-to-end: ingest, compatibility checks, epoch construction, stack, develop, study, export. At every step you can look at the inputs and the recipe that produced the output.

Who it's for

• Curious people who want to understand one image deeply.
• Educators who want a worked example, not a textbook figure.
• Photographers who already think in negatives, sidecars, and recipes.
• Researchers who want a low-friction sandbox for archival data.

Where it's going

The product is shipping in waves. We start with the black holes (Sgr A*, M87, NGC 1275, NGC 6240, Cyg X-1) because they're the objects with the deepest cross-archive coverage — Chandra, Hubble, JWST, NICER, EHT all looked at the same patches of sky. From there we open the room to galaxies, supernovae, transient catalogs, and the rest.

Read the manifesto for the why. Subscribe to the notes to follow the build.