This organization is a collection point for various open source projects built by & for the astronomy community on Bluesky.
Currently, we have four active, running web projects; three of which relate to our feeds, and one of which is an outreach bot.
We maintain the Astronomy feeds, which are a set of 'custom algorithms' that collate astronomy content on Bluesky. These feeds are moderated and come from a curated list of users. Any 'astronomer' - be they professional, amateur, a student, left the field, a science communicator, etc - is welcome to sign up to post to them!
The Astronomy feeds have over a thousand people signed up to post to them and are seen by tens of thousands of unique users daily. A typical week has around a thousand posts and many discussions stemming from them.
These feeds are supported by multiple projects, which live in the astronomy-feeds repository. They're powered by the ATProto Python SDK. Our feed library includes a Bluesky firehose client, a Flask server for serving posts, and a bot for handling signups and moderation.
The rules for our feeds and branding resources (i.e. the feed icon) also live in this GitHub organisation.
We are also developing a number of fun bot accounts to post interesting automated content. Currently, the running bot accounts not directly involved with the running of the feeds are:
- Galaxy-Zoo-Poster-Bot: a bot that posts images hourly that have been classified by volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo survey.