Barnard 33 — Horsehead Nebula · DSS H-α + Blue + 2MASS J composite
— 2026 / NIAGARA · EDITION Nº 01 BARNARD 33 · IC 434
DSS H-α + 2MASS J · STACKED

A darkroom
for the deep
sky.

Telescopes have been publishing raw frames every night for thirty years. Most of those frames have never been looked at twice. 1snob AstroRoom pulls them from the public archives, stacks them into a single deep exposure, and hands you the controls of a darkroom that knows what year it is.

Built for the curious, written for the working astronomer. Every decision is logged. Every parameter is reversible. The picture you walk out with is yours, and so is the paper trail that proves how you made it.

Open the room → Read the manifesto

— 02 / MANIFESTO

An image of the sky is the result of a hundred small decisions. Which frames you keep. Which pixels you reject. Which colour you assign to a photon you can't see. Where you crop, what you stretch, what you call signal and what you call dust.

Most software hides those decisions inside an auto mode and outputs a flattened JPEG. 1snob AstroRoom keeps every decision visible, reversible, and yours. We built it because the question that makes science worth doing is never what does the instrument say. It is what do we choose to see, and can we prove how.

— THE TEAM · NIAGARA · MMXXVI
— 03 / PIPELINE

Six steps you drive,
two the app handles.

8 stations
≈ 25 min · first run
— 01

Ingest

Type a name. M31, Crab, M87, Sagittarius A*. 1snob AstroRoom resolves it through SIMBAD TAP — falling back to CDS Sesame if the first try misses — then queries Chandra, MAST, SkyView, XMM, NuSTAR, Swift, INTEGRAL, Suzaku, and Fermi LAT in parallel and pulls back every public frame that overlaps your target.

— 02

Compat

Not every frame can be added to every other frame. Compat tags each one by epoch, instrument, and band, then groups frames that register cleanly together. You can override every group, but most of the time you don't need to.

Auto · skip-able
— 03

Epochs

Frames cluster around the dates they were observed. Sgr A* has Chandra observations from 1999 to last month. 1snob AstroRoom draws the timeline; you pick the window — a single night, a decade, or the whole archive.

Auto · skip-able
— 04

Stack

Merge frames into one deep exposure. Reprojected onto a common WCS, sigma-clipped to drop the cosmic-ray hits and the satellite trails, co-added at full bit depth. Pixel-rejection rules are visible, editable, and saved with the result.

— 05

Volume

Build a 3D cube. The Z-axis can mean six different things — intensity, epoch, band, residual, confidence, or anomaly score — and each mode auto-selects an appropriate transfer function so you read the cube the way it was meant to be read.

— 06

Develop

Tone, contrast, curves, false-colour assignment. Non-destructive controls applied to the FITS data itself rather than a flattened preview, the way a darkroom would have done it. The false-colour engine ships eighty-one named recipes across fourteen bands — from gamma to centimetre radio — so your photograph will not look like anyone else's.

— 07

Zoom

Inspect the target across angular scales. The same Sgr A* frame that fits inside one degree of sky also resolves down to the Chandra pixel — about half an arcsecond. The zoom ladder builds every intermediate panel for you.

— 08

Evidence

Export a report. A PDF, a JSON manifest, a Merkle root. Every frame that went in, every parameter you touched, every choice that was automated. Hand it to a referee, hand it to your future self. The picture is no longer just a picture.

— 04 / ATLAS

One target,
eighty-one ways
to develop the light.

14 bands × 81 recipes
catalogued
1snob AstroRoom Atlas · 25 black holes × 9 photoreal palette families · 225 plates
— SHEET 01 · BLACK HOLE ATLAS

25 objects.
Nine palette families.
Two-twenty-five plates.

Every supermassive, stellar, and intermediate-mass black hole 1snob AstroRoom can resolve in current public data, run through nine palette families — from a Hubble Heritage warm-edge through a JWST NIRCam mid-IR through a Chandra X-ray hard-band false colour. Two hundred and twenty-five plates, on one sheet. Hand the sheet to a peer reviewer with the recipe attached and the picture is reproducible.

25
Objects
9
Palettes
225
Plates
FITS
Source
Messier catalogue atlas — 110 objects on one sheet
Messier · 110 objects— 02
 Caldwell catalogue atlas — 109 objects on one sheet
Caldwell · 109 objects— 03
 Famous Deep Sky atlas — 30 objects on one sheet
Famous · 30 objects— 04
See all six sheets →
— 05 / STUDIES

One operation,
run to its end.

19 method studies
matrices, ladders, sweeps

Where the Atlas asks what does this catalogue look like under our recipes, a study asks what does this operation actually do. Recipe matrices, stacking ladders, alpha sweeps, instrument comparisons, 4D reconstructions — each one isolates a single decision and runs it across enough targets that the decision itself is what you read.

Horsehead Nebula — 81 recipe variations on one plate
Study 01 · 81 recipes on B33— 01
 Top 10 Chandra X-ray targets — recipe matrix
Study 03 · Top 10 X-ray— 03
 Milky Way 360 panorama
Study 18 · Milky Way 360— 18
See all nineteen studies →
— 06 / TARGETS

Anything named.
Anything resolvable.

11-tier catalogue
≈ 13,600 objects in framework
— 01 · X-RAY · RADIO · NIR · SUBMM Sgr A* The black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Only one pixel across in even the deepest current image, but lit across every band the catalogue holds. Twenty-six thousand light-years of distance, and we can still tell what colour it flares.
X-RayRadioNIRSubmm
— 02 · OPTICAL · NEAR-IR · UV · RADIO M31 Andromeda. Big enough on the sky that any backyard scope can find it. Deep enough to keep working astronomers busy for a century. Two trillion stars heading our way at a hundred and ten kilometres a second.
OpticalNear-IRUVRadio
— 03 · X-RAY · OPTICAL · GAMMA · RADIO The Crab A 1054 supernova remnant whose pulsar still ticks every thirty-three milliseconds. The sky's most photographed corpse, and one of the only things in the catalogue that has been imaged in every band a human can build a detector for.
X-RayOpticalGammaRadio
— 04 · X-RAY · OPTICAL · RADIO · NIR M87 Sixteen-point-four megaparsecs from us, and home to the supermassive black hole the EHT collaboration photographed in 2019. The jet from its central engine is visible in five different bands at the same time.
X-RayOpticalRadioNIR
Catalogues integrated:  Messier (110) · Caldwell (109) · NGC + IC (~5,000) · NASA Exoplanet Hosts (~4,500) · ATNF Pulsars · Arp Peculiar · Sharpless · Black Hole Top 25 · BH Phenomena · Modern SNe · Kilonovas · GRBs · FRBs · TDEs · IceCube Neutrinos · TeV Gamma · CMB Anomalies · IAU Constellations · NEOs · TNOs · Comets · Trojans
The four examples on this page come from the most heavily curated tier — the nine objects with complete FITS URL manifests in backend/app/data/objects.json. Anything else with a name SIMBAD or Sesame recognises is also reachable. 1snob AstroRoom is a name resolver as much as it is a darkroom.
— 07 / GALLERY

Pictures made
with 1snob AstroRoom.

From the team
and the early community
M87 Chandra X-ray jetM87
X-Ray · Chandra · 593 ksM87

The jet from a black hole.

Forty-seven Chandra obsids merged into one event file. The jet of M87's central engine, lit in photons that travelled fifty-five million years to reach the chip.

M31 Andromeda multiband compositeM31
DSS · 2MASS · GALEX · WISEM31

Andromeda's outer arms.

A median stack of public archive frames pulled across fourteen nights. The faint dust lanes of the spiral against a field that is, finally, perfectly black.

The Crab — pulsar wind nebulaCrab
Radio · 1.4 GHzCrab

The pulsar's wind.

Synchrotron radiation from the remnant, false-coloured against an optical underlay. The yellow knot at the centre is the corpse of the star that exploded in 1054.

Centaurus A — NGC 5128 in X-rayCen A
Chandra · X-rayCentaurus A

A galaxy eating itself.

NGC 5128 in X-ray. The dark band cutting across the disc is a dust lane left over from a galactic merger half a billion years old. The bright nucleus is the AGN feeding the central black hole.

Stephan's Quintet — JWST megastackSQ
JWST · NIRCam + MIRIStephan's Quintet

Five galaxies, one frame.

A megastack of public JWST exposures across NIRCam and MIRI bands. Four of the five are gravitationally bound; one is a foreground impostor.

Horsehead Nebula — Barnard 33B33
DSS H-α + 2MASS JHorsehead

Barnard 33, developed.

Sixteen optical and near-infrared frames stacked into the iconic silhouette. The dust lane reads red against the IC 434 emission in exactly the way the photons asked.

Open the gallery →
— 08 / NOTES

Field notes
from the room.

Long-form reading
Updated weekly
— 01

Why FITS, and never JPEG

Two formats walk into a frame. One was designed by photographers. One was designed by astronomers. The difference is what they think you're allowed to throw away.

Format · Apr MMXXVI Read → — 02

What we mean by a "deep" exposure

Stacking six hundred frames is not the same thing as a longer one. It is a different operation against a different kind of noise.

Method · Apr MMXXVI Read → — 03

The colour of an X-ray photograph

X-rays are invisible. Every published Chandra image is a choice. Here is how the choice gets made, and where the limits are.

Visualisation · Mar MMXXVI Read → — 04

Building volumes from flat images

A photograph of a galaxy has two spatial dimensions. The galaxy itself has three. 1snob AstroRoom builds the missing one out of what the data actually knows.

Method · Mar MMXXVI Read → — 05

Listening to a galaxy

Sgr A* does not make a sound. There is no medium between us. The sonification is a translation, with rules. The rules are the point.

Method · Feb MMXXVI Read → — 06

What an audit trail looks like

Every picture 1snob AstroRoom outputs comes with a chain of hashes. The chain says yes, this is the picture I made, and yes, this is exactly how I made it.

Method · Jan MMXXVI Read →
— 09 / ABOUT

A small studio
for large data.

1snob AstroRoom is built by a small team in Niagara, under the 1snob umbrella. We make tools for the moment when scientific data meets a human eye — the moment the question stops being what does the instrument say and starts being what do we choose to see.

The app is free during the public beta. The data is yours. The audit trail is yours. The decisions, especially, are yours. We are uninterested in any arrangement that ends with a flattened JPEG and a credit line.

14
Bands wired
(gamma → cm radio + CMB)
81
False-colour recipes
(across 9 palette families)
11
Catalogue tiers
(≈ 13,600 objects in framework)
8
Pipeline stations
(six you drive, two automatic)
— 10 / BETA ACCESS

A letter from the room,
once a month.

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