I remember how little I knew about MAST when I was preparing for my job interview. STScI is a highly respected institution, and I was inspired by MAST’s mission to make data from more than twenty space missions available to everyone. The opportunity to work at such a renowned place was incredibly attractive.

At the same time, I had never used MAST data in my own research, and I did not know much about space telescopes. MAST felt like a black box to me. I tried to imagine what people at MAST actually did and how everything worked behind... read more

Welcome to “MAST Wrapped 2025”! This post will present some highlights and statistics from this year at MAST.

Chapter 1: Data

Total Number of Files in MAST

This year, MAST surpassed 1 BILLION FILES! This covers over 356,276,560 unique observations from 96 different telescopes - both in space (like HST and JWST) and on the Earth.

New Data Added

MAST is growing VERY quickly: of those 1 billion files, 266 million of them were added in 2025! That’s over... read more

As of July 2025, MAST contains nearly 300 million astronomical observations! That’s a lot of data - but what does it look like? We have the answer!

These new wallpaper images depict MAST’s View of the Sky! This is an image using astronomical coordinates Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec), where each pixel is colored according to the number of observations in MAST at those coordinates. Dark pixels have fewer observations, while brighter pixels have several thousand.

Scroll down for the full story.

Downloadable MAST Wallpapers

Here are the MAST Wallpaper images... read more