We're building an astronomy education program that puts real telescope data in the hands of students who will never get to a dark sky site.
The ADSO Foundation is the nonprofit arm of Arizona Dark Sky Observatories. Our mission is simple: remove every barrier between underserved students and real astronomical science.
That means real telescope data from a Bortle 2–3 site in western Arizona, delivered to classrooms across the state — free, grant-funded, no equipment required. Students don't just look at pretty pictures. They work with raw FITS files, write code to process them, and produce finished images from data captured the night before.
Nobody else has built this program. We're building it.
MicroObservatory gives students a web tool to click through FITS processing. Las Cumbres Observatory gives students real data and teaches them to process it. Neither teaches students to write the code that does the processing. That's our program. Real data from last night's sky → kids write astropy and numpy to stack it → they produce the finished image themselves.
This is fundable, genuinely rare, and serves students who will never travel to a dark sky site. An NSF-aligned, NASA-adjacent curriculum built around professional-grade data from a privately operated Bortle 2–3 observatory.
The Foundation operates alongside ADSO LLC under a fair-market lease arrangement — a structure that is legitimate, widely used by observatory and science organizations, and designed from the start to support grant eligibility.
Schools and community programs pay nothing. Grants cover everything. The sales motion is not a pitch — it's offering something free that makes a teacher look good and costs the district nothing.
The Foundation is positioned to pursue federal and state grants once 501(c)(3) status is confirmed. Primary targets include NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), NASA Universe of Learning, Arizona Community Foundation STEM grants, and DarkSky International's educational programs.
The STEM coding differentiator — teaching students to write the processing code — is the grant story. It's novel, it's scalable, and it serves underrepresented communities. That combination is exactly what funders are looking for.
We're looking for educators, community organizations, donors, and board members who believe in what dark sky science can do for a kid who's never looked through a telescope.