Built a web-based planetarium that tracks vera rubin alerts plus more

Science Citizen Science
#1

Hi Everyone, I created this web app after watching a Youtube video from Fraser Cain about the public availability of Alerts from the ANTARES broker. I ended up connecting a bunch of different services together after a 1st attempt of integrating the transient alerts into my web app. Some of the features like the telescope control has been simulated but I haven’t tried it out with my telescope yet. I love to get your feedback about it.

Best, Alan

Description:
Vera Rubin Explorer is a citizen-science platform that aggregates real-time transient alerts from the ANTARES broker (fed by the Rubin Observatory’s LSST survey) and lets users discover, classify, and analyze astronomical events across multiple categories — supernovae, near-Earth objects, exoplanet transit candidates, comets, variable stars, and solar system objects via Fink. Each event card is enriched on-the-fly with crossmatches from Gaia, SIMBAD, NED, MAST/JWST, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, MPC, SDSS, and more, giving users multi-wavelength context, light curves, and sky viewer cutouts (Legacy Survey, SkyView, Aladin) in one place. AI-powered features (via Google Gemini) let users run deep analysis of light curves and get narrative explanations of what an object is and why it matters. Users can connect their own telescope mount directly through the browser using the Web Serial API — supporting LX200 (Meade, OnStep, ZWO AM5) and NexStar/SynScan (Celestron, Sky-Watcher) protocols — and slew to any discovered event for real-time follow-up observation from the Observe tab. A built-in watchlist tracks objects of interest, and contribution pathways let users export photometry in BJD-TDB format for NASA’s EXOTIC pipeline or flag new comet candidates for MPC submission. The app also pulls a live news feed from ADS, arXiv, and ATel, keeping users current on the latest astrophysics papers and circulars.

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#2

Hello Alan, great job.
And in a short timeframe I guess.
Can I report this back to Fraiser?
Or maybe you did allready?
That he inspired a dude in the Vera Rubin comunity to create a nice app in no time?
And what do we do with the pwrd?
Can this leave the comunity?
Greetings from Begium
Erik.

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#3

Hi Erik, thanks! I actually sent him an email a couple of weeks ago about it. The website is password protected so the pwrd is just to access it. It’s hosted on a free plan on Vercel so I have limited usage and some of the APIs are limited which is why I protected the site. However, feel free to share with others. Best, Alan

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#4

Hi Alan, very nice web app! Just a doubt: while looking at some objects I noticed that the Gaia counterparts look weird: I attach as an example ANT2020akkbe: the reported Gaia (DR3?) source id is 4352143554209359000, but this id does not exist in Gaia DR3. The closest Gaia DR3 source is Gaia DR3 4352143554209358720, whose magnitude and distance are consistent with the values reported in your page. Maybe I’m wrong, but can you please check the matches ad the names? Can it be that the long Source Ids have been read as number, not as string, and somehow rounded? Cheers Giuseppe

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#5

Thank you so much for trying it out and beta testing it for me. I’ll take a look and see what the issues maybe with it. Best, Alan

P.S. It was a rounding error due to JS limits. So now the ID is getting treated as text instead of a number. Let me know if it’s working now.

#6

Hi Alan, yes, the Gaia source Ids are fine now! Just a suggestion: for some objects (as ANT20265h66cinzul1b, the “possible match” is quite far (18" in this example). Would it be possible to add the distance of the nearest Gaia source in the Identification box? Cheers Giuseppe

#7

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This is really interesting. I was able to view an unidentified moving object. I’m using pansstarrs 1 map as reference, and you can see from the cutouts the object moving through the field. I’m really enjoying the data coming from Vera Rubin. What an amazing telescope.

#8

let me know if this works for you. The server has been down for the last 24 hours so may either see an error or take a long time to retrieve the identification from Gaia.

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#9

Hi everyone, I’m new to this forum. Today I opened this application and noticed that when I try to open AI Analysis - Analyze with AI, it asks me for a password. Could someone please tell me how I could get it? Thank you so much for your kind cooperation and have a good day everyone.

#10

Hi Sauro, Thanks for trying out the app. This app started out as a personal project after watching a Youtube video about the LSST. After working on it for the last few weeks I decided to share it with the rest of the community. The AI features are password protected because I’m using my personal api keys which unfortunately cost money to use. I’m not associated with Vera Rubin observatory at all. It was created mostly because of curiousity and my interest in astronomy. Best, Alan

#11

Thank you very much Mr. Alan, you really had a beautiful and brilliant idea, congratulations indeed

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#12

Thank Alan, it looks fine, great! Giuseppe

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#13

Added a new feature. Click any transient and you can now see exactly which dot on the sky map is the matched host or star — plus the brightest neighbours around it, so you can judge for yourself whether the cross-match nailed it or got a coincidence. Just toggle “Identified host/source” or “Field neighbours” in the Layers panel.

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#14

Thank you, Alan, for sharing your great work! How often does it refresh and cache alerts? I didn’t see that mentioned in the documentation, though I sure might have missed it.

Is there any thought of adding filtering alerts by declination and/or magnitude? I see the ability to do something along those lines for browser notifications, but it would be awesome to be able to prune the list of alerts shown using parameters like those.

Thank you again for sharing your creation with us!

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#15

Hi Kelly, you are most most welcome. I hope you are finding some use for the app. In terms of refresh, it happens on load and everytime you tap on a different tab. I also added a manual refresh button in the carousel and a time stamp of when the data was last refreshed. In terms of caching it depends. The discovery section updates every time Antares has a new loci. Same for SSOs with Fink. I do have the ability to save an event to a watchlist to watch over time. The news section is different and depends on the category. The exoplanet section goes back I think over two years. The NEOs are for the last 30 days.

Let me think more deeply about the filters. What was the use case exactly for the filter so I can make sure what I create ends up matching your expectation. I want to come up with filters for each category that make sense for it. Best Alan

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#16

Hi @atan02, that is very helpful info, thanks! Those are handy new features, too. My use case is conducting follow-up observations with a small university observatory that has essentially no time or budget to develop tools. It would be nice to have it only display objects that will be >20 degrees above the horizon at some point during the night (from our location, of course), and no dimmer than a specified magnitude (probably mag 18 in our case).

Perhaps a way to load all the alerts for a specific type of object from the last 24 hours, or something like that? With those filters, that would give an incredible amount of help. Being able to see details, for just the objects that we could realistically perform rapid follow-ups on, would be amazing.

The tool is fun as-is, and it’s very nearly also a great follow-up observational aide. Thanks for your time and efforts; they are appreciated!

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#17

A colleague just pointed me at this thread. It parallels rather nicely an idea I’m working on.

I’m noodling on a free-time hobby project to help the followup case, based on the following points. 1) Rubin will generate millions of alerts a night; 2) all the professional telescopes in the world could only hope to follow up a tiny fraction of those; 3) they’re all going to be interested in the same few hundred most interesting things each night; 4) while most of the alerts will be too dim for amateur scopes (or, assuming that most of the people interested in this project are in North America, which might be a really bad assumption, too far south) – nevertheless, with that many alerts, there are going to still be a lot that are bright enough and (depending on where Rubin was observing that night) far enough north that amateurs can see them.

What I envision is that observatories (very loosely defined: someone in their backyard is an observatory) will be able to register their site, with lat/lon/elevation plus how-faint-an-object-can-they-see-at-a-given-wavelength-with-a-given-exposure (that part’s still kind of fuzzy), tell a service when they are available (weather permitting), and then subscribe to an alert stream, which will then select among the available recent objects that meet all those criteria, and point the telescope there and record a followup observation and send it upstream (assuming you have some kind of telescope mount that we know how to drive; e.g. a Seestar, since seestar_alp exists already).

I haven’t given a ton of thought to what “upstream” here means, but I spoke to Kelle Cruz last week about it, and this seemed to her (and to me) like a good fit for Zooniverse.

Now, all of this, at the moment, is just a vague idea I have, and absolutely none of the software I need to write exists yet…but I will promise that it’s all going to be Open Source (likely MIT licensed) and therefore if all you want is the visibility and brightness checker, and you want to select your own targets from the filtered stream, you’re certainly free to do that.

(If we start from a categorized alert stream then that’s the answer to “specific type of object”.) I think this would be more-or-less what Kelly Grant wants.

I am affiliated with Rubin, but this project isn’t envisioned as such, but rather a moonlighting best-effort hobby project. Free Software: if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

So that all seems pretty similar to what Alan is already doing, with the possible exceptions that my use case is less people who want to see things we’re alerting on in real time, and more “I’m done with my photography for the night, but I’m going to leave the dome open another three hours and let the queue manager pick targets for my site,” and explicitly optimized for contribution submission. Also, rather than doing it as a web app, I’m envisioning that you have a small computer (say, a Raspberry Pi with a custom distro, which is basically just Rasbian + Python3 + whatever-this-package-ends-up-being-called) that subscribes to a publication service somewhere on the network, and that computer issues the commands to your mount. A pretty front-end UI was never part of my own plans, because that’s not the kind of work I know how to do.

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#18

Hi Kelly, I was thinking creating custom filters that would sit up at the top along with galaxies, transients, etc using the same design from the alert system where you can pick the event type, magnitude, min altitude and duration. I’m not sure if the Antares broker will let me make such complicated calls to their database but I can test it out. And you are very welcome. I really enjoy making this app. I’m an amateur astronomer but my new job has made it impossible for me to stay up late at night anymore to take photos of the night sky. This is something I can do in the daytime and still feel connected to the night sky. Best, Alan

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#19

Hi Adam,

What you articulated is actually very close to what I originally had in mind for my app, though I ultimately decided to go the web route instead. I still have telescope control by using a Node.js file that runs in Terminal, which connects the web app to NINA’s Alpaca server via ASCOM. So far, I’ve only tested it in simulation mode in NINA, though.

To be honest, I didn’t start with a fully thought-out plan. I was initially just experimenting with the broker system, and since then I’ve been gradually building it out and adding features along the way. We’ll see where the app goes next. Eventually, I’d love for it to help identify something that slips through the proverbial fingers of professional telescopes—that’s the dream :blush:

Anyway, thanks for responding and for taking the time to check out the app.

Best,
Alan

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#20

I have a question is this event considered to be within the extent of the galaxy? Click on the link to see. I’m curious about people’s opinions who are more knowledgable about this. Is this worthwhile to keep tracking?

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