A lantern, released
The mark is the Lone Star sparkle held in a sky-lantern's glass, casting the telescope's triple beam down to us.
One account, two clients, one sky
Lantern is a cloud astrophotography companion delivered as two thin clients that share a single account, plan, library, and gallery:
- A native mobile field app — plan tonight's sky and log a capture session fully offline at a dark site.
- A responsive desktop web app — connect storage, ingest subs, grade and cull, calibrate and integrate, then non-destructively process and publish, all in the browser.
The heavy work runs in the cloud
Multi-gigabyte pixel work — stacking, calibration, integration, and the processing pipeline — runs as cloud jobs. The clients stay thin: they submit jobs, stream progress, and render server-generated previews. Your source frames enter Lantern from your own cloud storage and never travel through anything they shouldn't.
Release a lantern
Lantern's emotional hook is releasing a lantern — dedicating a finished capture to someone, often someone lost, and sharing it at a chosen visibility into a memorial-aware community sky. It is handled with dignity: no ads, no cost, on a dedication view.
Lantern is part of the Lone Star Observatories family, built in Texas.