Acknowledgements

Starship stands on the shoulders of giants. We are only building upon the experience and learnings of those who came before — the open standards, the open-source projects, and the wider astronomy community that made modern, automated astrophotography possible. With gratitude, we acknowledge the tools, sources and scripts Starship is built on.

Design

The Starship logo and visual identity were designed by Mark Iscaro.

Standards & ecosystems

• ASCOM and ASCOM Alpaca — the device-interface standards that let

Starship talk to mounts, cameras, focusers, filter wheels and observatories across vendors (ascom-standards.org).

• PHD2 — the open-source autoguiding project Starship integrates with

(openphdguiding.org).

• ASTAP — astrometric plate solving (hnsky.org/astap).
• Cartes du Ciel / SkyChart — planetarium target lookup and Send/Fetch.
• Aladin Lite and the HiPS progressive-survey standard, from the

Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) — the interactive sky view behind Sky Atlas framing and mosaic planning, including the DSS surveys it displays (cds.unistra.fr).

• CDS Sesame — resolves a target name to J2000 coordinates through

SIMBAD, NED and VizieR when you look a target up by name online.

• The wider open-source astrophotography community — the conventions, ideas

and hard-won lessons of the projects that shaped what a capture-and-automation tool should be.

Libraries

• NumPy — all image analysis: star detection, HFR/HFD metrics, the autofocus

V-curve fit, FITS pixel handling and alignment math (BSD).

• psutil — the health monitor's memory and process vitals (BSD).
• pywin32 — the Windows COM bridge used for ASCOM (Mark Hammond / PSF-style).
• pySerial — serial control for GRBL-based hardware such as focuser and actuator controllers (BSD).
• Nuitka — compiles Starship into a standalone application (Apache-2.0).

Data & algorithms

• OpenNGC by Mattia Verga — the deep-sky catalogue behind Skyhunter

(CC-BY-SA-4.0; github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC).

• Astronomical Algorithms, Jean Meeus, and Paul Schlyter's planetary and

lunar theory — the solar, lunar and planetary position formulae behind darkness, transit, airmass, moon separation and Skyhunter's live solar-system bodies.

• Minor Planet Center (IAU/MPC) and JPL orbital elements, with the

IAU (H, G) two-parameter magnitude model — the asteroid and comet positions and brightness estimates in Skyhunter (bundled on disk, refreshed online when available, and computed locally).

• SGP4 and Spacetrack Report #3 / David Vallado's reference vectors,

with two-line element (TLE) sets — the satellite pass predictor in Skyhunter (TLEs fetched when online, then propagated fully offline).

• Ed25519 reference implementation (RFC 8032; D. J. Bernstein, N. Duif,

T. Lange, P. Schwabe, B. Yang) — the basis of Starship's offline, signed licensing (public-domain reference).

File formats & interoperability

• The FITS standard for image storage; Starship's files interoperate with

AstroPy, PixInsight, ASTAP and the other tools in an imager's workflow.

If we have used your work and not named it here, that is our oversight, not a slight — tell us and we will add it. Thank you, all of you.