SkyPortal: An Astronomical Data Platform

Stéfan J. van der Walt, Arien Crellin-Quick, and Joshua S. Bloom

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)
May 12, 2019

SkyPortal is a web application that stores and interactively displays astronomical datasets for annotation, analysis, and discovery. It is designed to be modular and extensible, so it can be customized for various scienti c use cases. It is released under the Modi ed BSD license.

SkyPortal was designed with time-series survey data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, and eventually The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, in mind.

By default, it aims to provide a useful, rich user experience, including light curves of named astronomical events/transients, spectra, live chat, and links to other surveys. But the intent, ultimately, is for the frontend to be modi ed to best suit the speci c scienti c problem at hand. The current UI/UX was inspired by that developed for the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) Marshal (Law et al., 2009).



Featured Fellows

Stéfan van der Walt

Senior Research Data Scientist

Joshua Bloom

Astronomy, UC Berkeley
Faculty Affiliate