Welcome to “MAST Wrapped 2025”! This post will present some highlights and statistics from this year at 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.
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.
Here are the MAST Wallpaper images... read more
MAST has been busy building support for Table Access Protocol (TAP) services on a modern Python platform, to support our catalogs large and small. Updates to improve metadata, usability, and documentation have culminated in a series of catalogs available via TAP standard API interfaces; this includes all data we’ve made available via TAP on older platforms. It is now time to sunset the TAP services on the previous system. We will be closing down the vao.stsci.edu TAP services on Thursday, June 26, 2025.
In order to support these improvements — especially TAP’s powerful but complex asynchronous job management infrastructure —... read more