In 2009 we created Chromoscope https://chromoscope.net/. In 2011 Jill Tarter shared a Wired story with us written by one of The SETI Institute's REU students. It was about a new full sky optical image. What was exciting for us was that the creator of the image, Nick Risinger, had made a limited resolution version of it available under a CC BY-NC (3.0) licence. So we used that as the first zoom level for the optical sky. For deeper zooms we kept with DSS2 as the CC-licensed image wasn't enough.
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Anyway, here in 2026, Cardiff University (who kindly paid for hosting all our map tile images since 2009) have been sent a copyright claim for use of the image. But we have been using it under the CC BY-NC licence terms as were given at the time. We've always provided the required credit line and it has been entirely noncommercial use.
Jill Tarter sent the email to us on 2nd May 2011. Here's a 30th April 2011 snapshot of the website where we got it from (skysurvey.org) from the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20110430104948/http://skysurvey.org/ That snapshot shows that the 3000x1500 pixel image was released under a CC BY-NC licence. Interestingly, it looks like that initial mention of a CC BY-NC licence was removed by May 7th 2011.
Photopic Sky Survey