radio astronomy — open data — in development
Listening to the noise that public radio telescopes already recorded.
Dark Swan reads raw archives from open, publicly funded radio observatories and looks for what's easy for a person to miss. No new dishes, no new hardware — just a better way to go through recordings that already exist.
Follow progress on XWhat it does
Radio observatories around the world publish raw or lightly processed recordings — voltage data, filterbanks, spectrograms — from facilities such as LOFAR, the Green Bank Telescope, MeerKAT, and various citizen and university archives. Most of it is never fully reviewed by a person; there's simply more data than there is time.
The plan is to train small, purpose-built models in-house — not a general model bolted onto astronomy data, but narrow ones trained on the shape of this specific signal problem. They'll surface candidates for a person to check, not draw conclusions on their own. The archives already exist. The point is to actually look at them.
Where things stand
Dark Swan is pre-product. Being upfront about that matters more to me than making it sound further along than it is.
Who's behind it
I'm COSARK, and right now I'm building Dark Swan alone. That means progress is unevenly paced — some weeks are all data plumbing, some are reading papers, some are just cleaning up archive metadata that nobody labeled properly. I'd rather ship the boring parts correctly than rush to a model that isn't ready.
If you work with radio-astronomy data, or you're curious about what turns up once someone actually goes through it, I'd like to hear from you.
— COSARK
Get in touch
No mailing list yet — updates and the occasional data note go out on X.