DeepSpaceYoloDataset: Annotated Astronomical Images Captured with Smart Telescopes

Abstract

Recent smart telescopes allow the automatic collection of a large quantity of data for specific portions of the night sky—with the goal of capturing images of deep sky objects (nebula, galaxies, globular clusters). Nevertheless, human verification is still required afterwards to check whether celestial targets are effectively visible in the images produced by these instruments. Depending on the magnitude of deep sky objects, the observation conditions and the cumulative time of data acquisition, it is possible that only stars are present in the images. In addition, unfavorable external conditions (light pollution, bright moon, etc.) can make capture difficult. In this paper, we describe DeepSpaceYoloDataset, a set of 4696 RGB astronomical images captured by two smart telescopes and annotated with the positions of deep sky objects that are effectively in the images. This dataset can be used to train detection models on this type of image, enabling the better control of the duration of capture sessions, but also to detect unexpected celestial events such as supernova.