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.

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Downloadable MAST Wallpapers

Here... read more

The release of Jdaviz 4.0 happened this week! Woohoo!

Jdaviz is an open source Python package developed to visualize and analyse data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Its user interface can be used in Jupyter Notebooks, as a stand-alone application, or embedded in webpages (like our dear MAST does!) and it is designed to provide visualization and analysis machinery for both spectra and imaging.

This week, the team released version 4.0 which carries major updates. Cubeviz (the Jdaviz configuration for cube data) is now equipped with a fully featured spectral extraction plugin. This enables you... 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... 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... read more

The release of Jdaviz 4.0 happened this week! Woohoo!

Jdaviz is an open source Python package developed to visualize and analyse data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Its user interface can be used in Jupyter Notebooks, as a stand-alone application, or embedded in webpages (like our dear MAST does!) and it is designed to provide visualization and analysis machinery for both spectra and imaging.

This week, the team released version 4.0 which carries major updates. Cubeviz (the Jdaviz configuration for cube data) is now equipped with a fully featured spectral extraction plugin. This enables you... 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

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... 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... read more

A new series of MAST technical articles has been published to our documentation platform. MAST Pro Tips features three new articles on advanced topics to help you improve your searches. Technical articles on other topics will appear from time to time. If you wish to learn more about a particular topic, please send your idea to archive@stsci.edu.

High Proper Motion Stars in MAST

Perhaps you knew that coordinates in MAST are assumed to be ICRS at the J2000 epoch, both as input for searches and as output for search results. It may not be a surprise... read more