Welcome to October! Fornax is happy to announce a faster Firefly and new resources for OpenUniverse2024 simulated data.
Before we dive in, we wanted to let you know that we’re aware of an issue causing the terminal to load and respond slowly. We are working on a fix.
Firefly in Fornax: Now Faster, Cloud-hosted
Did you know Fornax includes Firefly, an interactive viewer for astronomical images, tables, and spectra, right inside JupyterLab? It now runs on a new NASA Science Cloud deployment (Firefly) instead of IRSA’s on-prem servers, so large files load noticeably faster. A new landing page offers one-click examples, and dedicated TAP, SIAv2, and HiPS search tabs let you query VO-compliant archives beyond IRSA.
To try it, open Firefly Viewer from the JupyterLab launcher, double-click a FITS or Parquet file, or drive it from a notebook with the firefly_client Python library, as described in the extension’s README.
OpenUniverse2024 Slides, Videos, and Tutorials
OpenUniverse2024 is a collection of large-scale simulated observations designed to resemble expected data from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. IRSA recently hosted a virtual workshop walking through how to access and analyze this data using Python-based Jupyter notebooks. All workshop materials, including slides, videos, and tutorials, are now available on the OpenUniverse workshop page.