Welcome to part 2 of our “Meet MAST series”. Check out part 1. This interview is with…

Brian Erickson - Principal Software Engineer

I have been working as a user experience designer for close to 15 years. In that time I have worked with a lot of developers. Brian is top notch. When I hand him a design, he delivers! His attention to detail and polish is unmatched. We often sit down and live-code CSS until it looks just right. He is truly a craftsman!

Here’s an example to illustrate Brian’s commitment to getting the job done right.... read more

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... 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

Welcome to part 2 of our “Meet MAST series”. Check out part 1. This interview is with…

Brian Erickson - Principal Software Engineer

I have been working as a user experience designer for close to 15 years. In that time I have worked with a lot of developers. Brian is top notch. When I hand him a design, he delivers! His attention to detail and polish is unmatched. We often sit down and live-code CSS until it looks just right. He is truly a craftsman!

Here’s an example to illustrate Brian’s commitment to getting the job done right.... read more

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... 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