It's not every day I see a Raspberry Pi project that truly awes me. Fortunately, when those days do arrive, it's because someone has built something genuinely impressive. Well, it seems that today is our lucky day, as GitHub user cpaczek showed off their Skylight project, which beams live flight data onto your ceiling so you can see what's flying overhead. And I'm not even that big of a plane guy.

Skylight adds a real-time flight map to your ceiling

I could watch this for hours

You can see the project in action in the Reddit post above. To start, cpaczek shows the real-life plane flying overhead, before ducking inside to show off Skylight in action. They had set up a room where a projector beamed Skylight onto the ceiling, showing a real-time map of the airspace above their home. Sure enough, the map included a graphic for the plane that went overhead, including details such as its flight identifier, type, and trajectory.

For such an amazing project, cpaczek is oddly quiet in the Reddit thread. There's no description, no story about how it came about, nada. Fortunately, they were gracious enough to drop a link to the GitHub page, which contains everything you need to know to get it up and running in your own home. And why wouldn't you?

The bill of materials looks very manageable for a project as cool as this. It seems that all you need is a Raspberry Pi 5, a projector that can point at the ceiling, a micro HDMI to HDMI cable to connect the two, and an RTL-SDR Blog V4 to grab radio data from planes going by, although the project can also grab information from free APIs if you want to take that route. At any rate, it's a great deal cooler than opening up Flightradar24 every time a plane goes by.