It is conducted at the Steward Observatory's Catalina Station, located near Tucson, Arizona, in the United States.

CSS focuses on the search for near-Earth objects, in particular on any potentially hazardous asteroid that may pose a threat of impact.

Its counterpart in the southern hemisphere was the Siding Spring Survey (SSS), closed in 2013 due to loss of funding.

The 1.5-meter and 68-cm survey telescopes use identical, thermo-electrically cooled cameras and common software written by the CSS team.

The CSS team is headed by D. Carson Fuls of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona.

[18] In this project, the volunteers search for trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in pre-processed images of the Catalina Sky Survey.