Aviation enthusiast Cameron Paczek, who recently moved near San Francisco International Airport (SFO), spent his time checking flight tracking websites to identify planes flying over his house. Instead of pulling out his phone every time, he decided to create his own solution: Skylight .

His open-source project is based on a Raspberry Pi 5, an ADS-B radio receiver, and a video projector. Airliners constantly transmit ADS-B signals containing their position, altitude, and other flight information. Skylight captures these signals directly using an RTL-SDR radio antenna, without relying on services like Flightradar24.
The data is then projected in real time onto the living room ceiling. Each plane appears in its actual position in the sky, accompanied by various information such as its model, destination, altitude, and remaining distance to its arrival. The system also displays stars, constellations, the Sun, the Moon, satellites, and even the International Space Station.

Named Skylight, the project is entirely open source and its source code is available on GitHub. According to its creator, a working version can be assembled for just a few hundred dollars with relatively affordable hardware.