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

MAST has just launched a centralized, searchable web portal that indexes the documentation for our many APIs. You can browse through summaries of supported services or enter search keywords (for example: mission names, interface standards like “cone search”, or service features like “cutouts”) to retrieve a list of related services. Search results include direct links to their corresponding documentation, making it easier and faster to find the right tool for the job.

This 1.0 release focuses on the many OpenAPI standard web services MAST hosts on our Python platform. Each listing provides links to project homepages and to Sphinx API documentation... read more

Last year, STRAUSS and Jdaviz started a collaboration to sonify astronomical data and open up a whole new way of interacting specifically with 3D cubes. Today, STRAUSS+Jdaviz won a prize for the 2025 sonification awards!

What is STRAUSS?

STRAUSS is a Python toolkit for the representation of data into sound with both scientific and outreach applications. It can be used to enhance visual representations or for accessibility for visually impaired users.STRAUSS is intended to be straightforward, but also flexible enough to allow for detailed control over the sonification process. The project is described in more detail in the... read more