Terms of Service

Last updated: August 8, 2026.

Welcome to SmartScopeClub. These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and SmartScopeClub ("we", "us", "our"), covering the website and app at smartscope.club, the Dark-Sky Engine and its embeddable widget and API, our newsletters and notifications, and every related feature (together, the "Service").

By using the Service, creating an account, joining a club, attending a star party, or posting anything, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service. The spirit of all of this is unchanged from day one: we are here to help you enjoy the night sky, use your own judgment, and be kind.

Please read Section 16 carefully. It requires most disputes to be resolved by individual binding arbitration and waives your right to participate in a class action, unless you opt out within 30 days.

1. Who may use the Service

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service and at least 13 to create an account. If you are under 18, you may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian, who agrees to these Terms on your behalf and is responsible for your use of the Service. We do not knowingly permit anyone under 13 to create an account or post content.

You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under applicable law, or if we have previously terminated your account.

2. Your account

Some features (saved places, clubs, star parties, chat, photo galleries, notifications) require an account. When you create one you agree to provide an accurate email address and a display name, to keep your password confidential, and to notify us promptly at privacy@smartscope.club if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.

You are responsible for all activity that happens under your account. Accounts are personal to you. Do not share credentials, do not create an account for anyone else without their permission, and do not impersonate another person, club, or organization.

You may stop using the Service at any time. You can request deletion of your account and associated personal information as described in our Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate an account, remove content, or restrict access at our discretion, with or without notice, including for violations of these Terms or conduct that puts other members at risk.

3. Community rules

The Service includes places where people talk to and meet each other: club pages and applications, star party pages, live chat during a party, transcripts, photo galleries, target lists, and profile bios. In all of them, you agree not to:

• harass, threaten, stalk, bully, or intimidate anyone, or encourage others to do so;
• post hateful content targeting people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any similar characteristic;
• post sexual content, sexualized content involving minors of any kind, graphic violence, or content promoting self-harm;
• post content that is unlawful, defamatory, deceptive, or that infringes anyone's copyright, trademark, privacy, or publicity rights;
• share another person's private information (home address, precise location, phone number, email) without their clear permission;
• spam, advertise, solicit, run contests or giveaways, or use the Service for commercial promotion without our written permission;
• impersonate any person or organization, or misrepresent your affiliation with a club, park, observatory, or manufacturer;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service, probe or test its security, circumvent rate limits or authentication, interfere with other users' access, or upload malicious code;
• scrape, crawl, harvest, or bulk-download content, accounts, coordinates, or Dark-Sky Engine outputs, or use automated means to access the Service, except as permitted by our published API terms;
• use the Service or its data to train a machine-learning model without our written permission.

We may remove content and suspend accounts that break these rules. We are not obligated to monitor content, but we may.

4. Your content and the rights you give us

"Your Content" means anything you submit or post: photos and captions, chat messages, club names and descriptions, star party details, target lists, profile information, bios, avatars, application notes, and anything you send us.

You keep ownership of Your Content. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example resizing and generating thumbnails), publish, publicly display, and distribute Your Content for the purpose of operating, promoting, and improving the Service, including in our newsletter, on our social accounts, and on the parts of the site or app where you chose to post it. Where you supplied a credit name, we will use it.

This license lasts as long as Your Content is on the Service and for a reasonable period afterward for backups, caches, and copies that others have already shared or that appear in party transcripts. It ends for future uses when you delete Your Content or we remove it.

You represent and warrant that you own or control all rights in Your Content, that it does not infringe anyone else's rights, that you have permission from any identifiable person in a photo, and that your posting it does not violate any law or agreement.

You are responsible for keeping your own copies. We are not a backup service and may delete content at any time.

5. Clubs and star parties are organized by members, not by us

This section is important. Please read it.

Clubs and star parties are created, described, run, moderated, and cancelled by members. We do not organize, sponsor, supervise, endorse, inspect, or take part in them, whether they happen online or in person, and we are not a party to any arrangement between a host, a club, and their attendees.

We do not verify the identity of any member, host, or club owner. We do not perform background checks or screening of any kind. We do not verify that a listed location is safe, accessible, legal to access at night, or open to the public, and we do not verify that a host has permission to be there or to bring guests.

If you attend an in-person event, you do so entirely at your own risk. You are responsible for evaluating who you are meeting, telling someone where you are going, arranging your own transport, obeying park hours and posted rules, obtaining any permits, and deciding whether a site and its conditions are safe for you. If you bring a minor to an event, you are solely responsible for supervising them. Hosts are responsible for the events they run, for complying with the rules of the land they use, and for any permissions and insurance their event requires.

Club owners and hosts can see information about members who apply or join, including display names, application messages, and star party attendance. If you are a club owner or host, you agree to use that information only to run your club or event and to comply with applicable privacy law. You must not add members to mailing lists or contact them for unrelated purposes without their consent.

Release. To the fullest extent permitted by law, you release SmartScopeClub from any claims, demands, damages, injuries, and losses of every kind, known or unknown, arising out of or in any way connected with your interactions with other members, your attendance at or hosting of any event, or any dispute between you and another member. If you are a California resident, you expressly waive California Civil Code Section 1542, which reads: "A general release does not extend to claims that the creditor or releasing party does not know or suspect to exist in his or her favor at the time of executing the release and that, if known by him or her, would have materially affected his or her settlement with the debtor or released party."

6. Live chat and transcripts

Star parties include a live chat. Messages you send are stored on our servers and are visible to everyone with access to that party, including people who join later and anyone who can open the party's transcript page. Hosts can moderate their party's chat, including muting a participant. Do not treat party chat as private or confidential, and do not post anything in it you would not want retained and read later. Chat is not encrypted end-to-end, and we can access it for moderation, safety, legal, and troubleshooting purposes.

7. Notifications

With your permission we send email alerts (for example clear-night alerts for a saved place) and browser or device push notifications. You control these in your account settings, by turning off alerts on individual saved places, by unsubscribing from any newsletter using the link in it, or by revoking notification permission in your browser or device. We may still send you essential service messages about your account, security, or these Terms.

8. Sky data, forecasts, and the limits of what we can tell you

Astronomical timings (sunset, twilight, darkness windows, Moon phase and rise/set, object positions and visibility) are computed from published ephemerides and catalogs and are as accurate as we can make them. Cloud cover, transparency, seeing, aurora probability, light-pollution estimates, and Bortle ratings are forecasts, models, and heuristics, never guarantees. They can be wrong, stale, or unavailable.

Do not make travel, financial, safety, or emergency decisions based on our data alone. Always check current conditions, weather warnings, road conditions, and official park guidance before you go.

9. Safety

Observing takes place at night, often in cold, remote, unlit places with uneven ground, wildlife, and no cell service. You are responsible for your own safety and for anyone in your care.

Never point a telescope, finder, binoculars, or camera at the Sun without a purpose-built, undamaged solar filter fitted correctly and in front of the objective. Doing so can cause instant and permanent blindness, and can destroy your equipment. Nothing in the Service should be read as advice that any particular observation, filter, or setup is safe. Follow your equipment manufacturer's instructions.

Use red light, respect other observers' dark adaptation, and follow the rules of the site you are on. Some locations require permits or close after dark.

10. Equipment recommendations, affiliate links, and outbound links

Some links on this Service earn us a commission. Park pages carry a lodging map, provided by Stay22, showing hotels, cabins and campgrounds near that park. If you book through it we receive a commission from the booking provider. You pay the same price either way, and no part of it comes from you.

A commission never buys a placement or a rating. The lodging map shows what is near a set of coordinates, and the results are not ordered, filtered, or promoted by us. Equipment recommendations reflect our honest opinions: no manufacturer pays for placement, and the "where to buy" links on the Scopes page are plain links that earn us nothing. If that changes on any page, that page will say so.

We do not set prices, hold your booking, or take your payment. Any reservation you make is a contract between you and the provider you booked with, under their terms, and questions about it go to them. Links to retailers, booking providers, NASA, the National Park Service, and other external sites are provided for convenience. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content, accuracy, prices, availability, or privacy practices.

11. Our content and intellectual property

Original text, graphics, code, the SmartScopeClub name and logo, and the outputs of the Dark-Sky Engine are owned by SmartScopeClub and protected by intellectual property law. You may link to and quote our pages with attribution. Wholesale reproduction, redistribution, or building a competing product from our data requires our written permission.

Third-party material remains subject to its own terms and licenses, including deep-sky object data from OpenNGC (CC-BY-SA-4.0), weather data from Open-Meteo (CC-BY-4.0), map data from OpenStreetMap and its tile providers, space-weather data from NOAA, solar-system positions from NASA/JPL, imagery credited to NASA/ESA, and park data and photography from the U.S. National Park Service.

12. The embeddable widget and API

Partner access to the Dark-Sky Engine, including API keys and the embeddable widget, is governed by the individual partner agreement under which the key was issued, in addition to these Terms. API keys are issued to a named partner, must be kept confidential, and may be rate-limited, suspended, or revoked. Do not cache or redistribute Engine outputs beyond what your agreement allows.

13. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@smartscope.club including: your contact information; identification of the work you claim is infringed; identification of the material you want removed and where it is on the Service; a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act on the owner's behalf; and your physical or electronic signature.

If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send a counter-notice to the same address. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

14. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, or availability. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that data will be accurate or preserved.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, SmartScopeClub will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, personal injury, property damage, or damages arising from: your use of or inability to use the Service; any content posted by any user; any conduct, communication, meeting, or event involving other members; reliance on sky, weather, light-pollution, or location data; or unauthorized access to your account or content.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or fifty U.S. dollars ($50). Most of the Service is free, so for most users this amount is $50.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of liability for certain damages. In those places, the exclusions and limits above apply only to the extent permitted, and nothing in these Terms limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by our negligence where that limit is not permitted by law.

15. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless SmartScopeClub and its operators from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from Your Content, your use of the Service, any event you host or attend, your violation of these Terms, or your violation of any law or the rights of anyone else.

16. Disputes, arbitration, and class-action waiver

Please read this section carefully. It affects how disputes between us are resolved.

Informal resolution first. If you have a problem, email legal@smartscope.club with a description of the dispute and the relief you want. We will try in good faith to resolve it. Both of us agree to attempt informal resolution for 60 days before starting a formal proceeding.

Binding arbitration. If we cannot resolve it, you and SmartScopeClub agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court, except that either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either of us may seek injunctive relief in court for infringement or misuse of intellectual property. The arbitration will take place in Wisconsin or, at your election, by telephone, video, or on written submissions. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

Class-action waiver. Disputes must be brought on an individual basis only. You and SmartScopeClub waive any right to bring or participate in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action, and an arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) must proceed in court.

Your 30-day right to opt out. You may opt out of this arbitration section by emailing legal@smartscope.club with the subject "Arbitration Opt-Out" within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, including your name and the email address on your account. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms, and we will not treat it as a reason to close your account.

17. Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wisconsin, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. For any dispute not subject to arbitration, you and SmartScopeClub consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts located in Wisconsin.

18. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

We may add, change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. We may update these Terms, and the current version will always be posted here with its "last updated" date. If a change is material, we will make reasonable efforts to tell you in advance, for example by a notice in the app or an email. Continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

19. General

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any partner agreement, are the entire agreement between us about the Service. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (content licenses already granted, releases, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnification, arbitration, and governing law) survive.

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms, legal notices, copyright complaints, and arbitration opt-outs: legal@smartscope.club. Privacy and account requests: privacy@smartscope.club.