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

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