About
What TheGodex is
Public sky surveys have photographed the entire sky, many times over, for decades. Buried in those archives are asteroids nobody has catalogued, stars that moved when nothing was supposed to move, and changes no one has ever looked at. The images are free and public — what’s scarce is attention.
TheGodex turns idle browsers into that attention. While a volunteer’s machine is open, it fetches public survey imagery directly from the archives, analyzes it on the volunteer’s own GPU, and flags anything unusual. The machine finds candidates; humanity decides what matters.
The trust model — why a find here means something
Nothing becomes “real” on one machine’s word. Every candidate climbs a ladder, and every rung is enforced server-side:
- Independent re-measurement. For moving objects, our server independently re-fetches the same public archive pixels and confirms a real source at every claimed position before a candidate is even created. Fabricated detections die here — they never reach a human.
- Independent human review.Contributors who helped find a candidate cannot vote on it. Consensus is weighted by each reviewer’s measured accuracy — accuracy we measure by quietly mixing synthetic “gold” targets into everyone’s work, including our own.
- Expert verification. Verified institutions — observatories, universities, credentialed researchers — provide the final tier before a find is reported outward (for example to the Minor Planet Center).
What your machine actually does
Your browser downloads small tiles of public survey imagery (never through our servers — straight from the archive), compares epochs taken years or hours apart, and measures anything that moved, appeared, or vanished. Inference runs entirely on your device. We never see your files, your camera, or anything outside the browser tab. Every find is credited to the people whose machines measured it.
What it costs
Nothing — and that’s structural, not promotional. The imagery is open data, the analysis runs on volunteer devices, and the models are small enough to ship to a browser. There is no paid tier and no advertising.