Eigenstate

Cerro Seco National Observatory sits on a mountaintop above the empty desert of southern Arizona. You arrived for a one-week observing run, expecting to meet your research advisor and a team of technicians. Everyone is gone. The observatory is empty, powered down, and in disrepair.

Search the Sky

Slew the telescope across a vast night sky, lock on to an object, then hold it steady while the data comes in. Holding a lock is a live tracking skill, not a button you press - some objects fight back, and losing focus costs you the capture. Power and storage run out every night, so choose carefully what you spend them on.

Analyze What You Find

Raw data isn't enough. Every capture has to be analyzed before it becomes a catalogue entry: frame a peak in a sliding window, chase a live signal through a moving aperture, or fit a rotating band to a scatter of points. Each spectrum reads differently, and the signal decays while you work it, so you're always racing to capture what's left.

Fill the Catalogue

Over 850 astronomical objects spanning more than 20 classes: main-sequence stars, pulsars, molecular clouds, spiral galaxies and rarer things. Your catalogue fills in as you work, illustrated with plates of the specimens you caught yourself. Some phenomena drift through unannounced and are gone again - catch them while they last.

Restore the Observatory

Between nights, walk the mountaintop in first person. Bring dead systems back online, install upgrades at the console or out at the hardware itself, and find your way into buildings that start locked.

Better instruments see into new spectra, resolve fainter and more distant objects, and reach parts of the sky you couldn't point at before. The same object gives up different data in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light — so the things you thought you'd finished are worth going back to.

Read What They Left Behind

Logs, notes and messages surface as you restore the site. The staff's account of what happened here is scattered across the machines they abandoned, and it's the only way to learn what they found.

Look Deeper

As you see further and further, you can explain less and less. The telescope moves on its own. Strange data fills the servers. Interference creeps between systems, and your controls begin to drift, invert, and lie to you.

The better your instruments get, the more clearly it can be seen...