Why this site exists

▸ Orientation video

Watch the orientation

▸ What Skypedia is

A quiet corner of the internet for what’s happening above us.

Every card on this site pulls from a named public source. NASA, NOAA, JPL, NARA, AARO, ODNI, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and RSS headlines from NASA, ESA, JPL, Spaceflight Now, Phys.org, Science Daily, and arXiv. When one of those sources goes dark, the corresponding section on the site hides itself instead of showing anything made up.

The full source list, with URLs, refresh cadence, and licences, lives in DATA_SOURCES.md in the repo. Nothing on this page is a black box.

▸ What Skypedia is not

Not tracking you. Not selling you anything.

• No user accounts.
• No cookies.
• No analytics. Not Google, not Plausible, nothing.
• No ads. No affiliate links. No sponsored content.
• No third-party embeds that phone home. Images are host-allowlisted; a strict CSP blocks everything else.

The trade-off: we have no idea if anyone reads any of this. That’s the deal.

▸ Why to trust it (and where not to)

Open source. Auditable. Honest about the gaps.

The code is on GitHub. The data pipeline commits its own snapshots so anyone can reproduce a build. Security workflows scan every push. But this is a one-person side project. Specifically:

• The curated UAP cases are hand-authored summaries of public reporting. They’re sourced, but a subject-matter expert should verify them.
• The “live” ISS ticker refreshes weekly, not in real time. Its label says so.
• Copy is written for general readers. If a page reads wrong to a scientist or educator, tell me and I’ll fix it.

▸ Version & build

What’s running right now.

Every push to mission_control bumps the semantic version, tags the release, and rebuilds the site. Click the numbers below to jump straight to the release notes or the exact commit on GitHub.