After more than three years of planning, hardware assembly, data collection, and analysis, the Galileo Project, under my leadership, released the commissioning data from its first Observatory at Harvard University in a new paper (posted here  and currently under peer review), with my Galileo Project postdoc Dr. Laura Domine as first author.

The Galileo Project Observatory is the first of its kind. Standard astronomical observatories focus on a small portion of the sky at any given time, seeking sources at great distances and ignoring objects flying overhead. The Galileo Project research team developed an original design of an array of sensors that monitor the entire sky at all times and collect infrared, optical, radio, magnetic, and audio data.

Altogether, the Galileo Project Observatory is recording a continuous movie of the sky. The data is uploaded to a computer system and subsequently analyzed by machine-learning algorithms. The computer software is optimized to identify outliers among familiar insects, birds, leaves, clouds, balloons, drones, airplanes, and satellites that appear in the data stream.