Skyborn
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SKYBORN · COLOPHON

A small archive,
printed as cards.

Skyborn is a free, public-archive reading room dressed as a card vault. You bring a date, or a name. We bring the picture taken on it — or the patch of Earth shaped like it — and print the result as a numbered, holo-foiled trading card.

I · WHAT IS SKYBORN

A personal cosmos as a collection.

Most of us were born under a sky we never saw. Somewhere, a telescope was awake — Hubble, the Very Large Telescope, a Landsat satellite — recording an image we have, until now, never been told was ours. Skyborn finds that image and prints it as a card.

The card is the unit. Catalog ID. Rarity. Edition. A holographic foil edge that ripples when you tilt it. Stat lines along the bottom. A wordmark embossed across the lower portion that only shows at certain angles. The artifact is the point.

Skyborn is free and ad-free. The vault is open to everyone because the source archives are.

II · THE VAULT

Seven public archives, attribution baked in.

Every card carries the credit string mandated by its license. Where the source is in the public domain, we still record the photographer, the instrument, and the release date. Nothing is anonymous.

NASA APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day — daily image with explanatory text since 1995. Public domain except where the photographer is credited as copyright holder.
PUBLIC DOMAIN
ESA Hubble
NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope outreach archive. ESA contributions CC BY 4.0; NASA contributions public domain.
PD / CC BY
ESA Webb
James Webb Space Telescope outreach. NASA / ESA / CSA — public-domain or CC BY 4.0.
PD / CC BY
ESO
European Southern Observatory — VLT, ALMA, ELT outputs. CC BY 4.0.
CC BY 4.0
USGS Landsat
USGS — Landsat 8 / 9 multispectral scenes. Public domain. Used for /name/ letterforms.
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Copernicus Sentinel
European Earth-observation programme — Sentinel-2 MSI scenes for letterforms. Open access per Copernicus terms.
COPERNICUS · OPEN
ESA Gaia
Gaia DR3 stellar catalogue — used to pull a "birthday star" when no photographic plate exists for the date.
CC BY 4.0
III · A PLAIN STATEMENT

Skyborn is not affiliated with NASA, ESA, ESO, USGS, or the Copernicus programme. It is built with their public-domain and CC BY 4.0 imagery, with credit preserved on every card.

If you are a curator or rights holder and would like attribution corrected, removed, or improved on any plate, write to hello@skyborn.app.

COLOPHON

Made with ♥
by RevoltBots.

A small studio that builds tools for the public archive. Not a startup. No funding. No API.

SET IN
Inter Tight · Inter · IBM Plex Mono
PIGMENTS
Photo-black #0A0A0A · Ivory #F5F1E8 · Cyan #5DE3FF · Holo
WRITE
hello@skyborn.app