Today we’re excited to announce new data from SPHEREx and ZTF, and updates to the Fornax Science Console.
SPHEREx Observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS
SPHEREx observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in August and December 2025. The calibrated spectral images are available through IRSA, alongside all other SPHEREx mission data.
More information is available at SPHEREx observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS, which includes a table listing the observations. The observations can be browsed and visualized on Fornax using the Astroquery, PyVO, and Firefly (same as IRSA Viewer in the link above) techniques demonstrated in IRSA’s SPHEREx Tutorial Notebooks.
ZTF Data Release 24
The twenty-fourth public data release from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) includes 69.7 million single-exposure images, 188 thousand co-added images, accompanying source catalog files containing 1043 billion source detections extracted from those images, and 5.32 billion light curves constructed from the single-exposure extractions.
ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory since 17 March 2018. This release adds 12 months of observations to the twenty-third data release, up to 22 October 2025 for the public portion of the survey, and private survey time prior to 22 July 2024. The private surveys include observational programs awarded by Caltech or performed by the ZTF collaboration.
Access to the data products from Fornax is available via the API services described at IRSA - ZTF. Complete release notes are available at https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/ZTF/docs/releases/ztf_release_notes_latest.
Fornax Science Console Updates
The Fornax science environment has been updated to version: 26.0223. The changes include:
- Add ML tools to the python3 environments.
- Expose the image version as a variable FORNAX_SOFTWARE_VERSION.
- Make standard compilers available by default.
- Disable notebook-updates to avoid confusion with the installed environments.