Header image: Philippe Donn

The community of astronomers, astrophotographers, and planetary scientists on Bluesky has only grown stronger over the past two years. Bluesky is now the de facto town square of science. We’re proud to have played our part, building open-source integrations for the community like the astronomy feeds. But we need your help!

I (Emily) have been covering hosting costs myself, in part due to the complexity of setting up donations as a foreigner living abroad and frequently moving country. However, we were recently introduced to an absolutely wonderful platform for gathering donations for an open-source project like ourselves: Open Collective.

Open Collective is a ‘fiscal host’ - they’re a charity that supports open-source software projects by taking donations on their behalf and managing their finances. By being on Open Collective, we don’t have to worry about the complexities of setting up a charity - we can have the convenience of something like a Patreon page, but with automatically managed, transparent finances. Quite a few projects that you may already know are on Open Collective, like Astropy and various Linux distributions.

So I’m delighted to announce that The Astrosky Ecosystem now has a page on Open Collective! If you’ve enjoyed our feeds or just want to support our project, any donation helps. We’ve set up a few recurring donation tiers, but you can also do one-off donations of any amount of your choosing.

Our initial plan for our finances is to try and cover our hosting costs, which are about €40 per month. Given that our feeds get over 20,000 unique visitors each month, this means we’d only need about 0.05% of feed viewers to give ~1 coffee per month to cover our costs - which we’re hoping we can achieve! In the unlikely (but incredible) event that we can raise more than that, we’d put the money towards two things.

Firstly, in 2026, we want to start offering Bluesky account hosting for our community - which will add more to our hosting costs. This is something that’s starting to happen on Bluesky - for instance, Blacksky now has independent account (a.k.a. ‘PDS’) hosting. Hosting accounts would be an amazing thing for us to be able to do: we’d be able to ensure data sovereignty and longevity for the astronomy community online, forever, by hosting your data independently of Bluesky. Put simply: a billionaire could never f*ck up our community ever again!

Secondly, we’re starting to advertise our project more at conferences - and depending on hosting being covered, it would also be nice to be able to pay for some (or all) of our core developers’ expenses to attend them.

If you’re able to support us financially and would like to do so, thank you so much. We’d like to play around with perks for donators in the future (send us ideas!), and we will very proudly display the names of our contributors here on our website. You can also donate anonymously if you prefer. Thank you so much!