Hi all,
We’re happy to announce the release of Astro-COLIBRI v2.32.0! The main sky map can now show the sky exactly as seen from your observatory, three new home screen widgets join the ones from v2.31, and a dedicated observing-conditions panel brings the weather forecast, cloud layers, satellite and radar imagery to any observatory. The Kafka broker and Python SDK both got a round of improvements, and gamma-ray bursts localized by the Interplanetary Network (IPN) are now ingested automatically.
Here are the highlights of this release:
Alt-Az sky map: see the sky as it looks from your observatory, zenith at the centre and horizon at the edge.
New home screen widgets: Aurora forecast, Observing conditions and Broker status join Latest, Watchlist, Tonight and Activity.
Observing conditions for your observatory: forecast, cloud layers, satellite and radar in one panel, shareable with a link.
Kafka broker & Python SDK: far fewer repeated alerts, ordered updates, and a new API Client in the SDK, available via PyPI and GitHub.
Gamma-ray bursts localized by the IPN: Interplanetary Network triangulations are parsed and mapped automatically.
A clearer interface: reworked menus, a new Display Settings panel, and a redesigned filter area.
Sharper AR pointing: more accurate marker placement for augmented reality mode, especially on Android.
We describe the main new features in detail in the replies below. The full changelog is on our release history page.
As always, this update also includes a series of minor improvements and bug fixes.
And of course we look forward to your feedback!
Clear skies,
The Astro-COLIBRI Team
Alt-Az sky map
The main sky map can now show the sky in local horizontal coordinates: azimuth and altitude as seen from your observatory, with the zenith at the centre and the horizon at the edge, alongside the existing equatorial and galactic views.
- Select AltAz in Map & coordinates settings in the app, or switch on Science mode and click the globe icon in the top bar on the web.
- Move through time and watch the events, the Sun and the Moon reposition: tap the time in the app, or drag the 24-hour slider on the web.
- Switch the selected observatory with the button under the map to see the sky from another site.
- Events you cannot observe are dimmed: an orange outline marks events above the horizon but outside your observatory’s zenith range, and events below the horizon are faded with a crossed-out eye.
New home screen widgets
Three new widgets for Android and iOS join Latest discoveries, Watchlist, Observable tonight and the main Astro-COLIBRI widget we release with version v2.31.0 a few weeks ago.
- Aurora forecast, for your observatory or your phone’s position: the NOAA oval map, the modelled intensity where you are, your distance to the oval, and the Kp outlook.
- Observing conditions, for tonight at your observatory: darkness and moonlight, cloud cover, rain or snow, seeing and the Moon. Large widgets also show the cloud cover at low, mid and high altitude.
- Broker status: keep an eye on the Kafka broker to see if publishing proceeds normally, the number of alerts published today, active listeners, queue and latency, and the last seven days of activity.
- Tapping a widget opens the matching panel in the app.
Add them from your home screen as usual. Widgets need a verified Astro-COLIBRI account, and the Widgets & smart home entry of the app menu lists all of them.
Observing conditions for your observatory
The visibility section now offers a dedicated Observing conditions panel: forecast, cloud layers, satellite and radar for the selected observatory, in one place.
- Tonight at the site: cloud cover, seeing and the Moon, with humidity, wind, jet stream, aerosols and precipitation one tap away and flagged when they’re worth a look.
- Two nights, noon to noon, in local time and UTC, with darkness, moonlight and the three-hourly forecast.
- Cloud layers: hourly cloud cover above the site and in the low, mid and high layers — for mountain observatories, a sea of clouds below the summit no longer counts as cloud overhead.
- Satellite and radar: a two-hour infrared satellite loop and the rain radar around the site.
- The weather station and all-sky camera of the observatory, Clear Outside, meteoblue and Heavens-Above are all linked from the same place.
- Open it directly at astro-colibri.com/weather and share the link with your colleagues, selected observatory included. Requires a verified Astro-COLIBRI account.
Kafka broker & Python SDK
Alerts now reflect real changes: a light curve update is published on the “all” topics only when the photometry actually changes, instead of once a night for every event, far fewer repeated alerts. All updates of one event now also arrive on the same partition and in order, keyed by the event ID, with dedupe_key and event_version headers so you can drop duplicates and ignore stale revisions.
Query Astro-COLIBRI from Python: astro-colibri 1.1.0 adds an API Client next to the broker Consumer.
pip install --upgrade astro-colibri
- Look up events by trigger ID or name, list every localization of a source, and search transients by time window or around a position.
- Search inside the 90% localization contour of gravitational-wave, Fermi-GBM, IceCube and MAXI events, apply your filters, and export the results as VOTable.
- Broker alerts now arrive decoded: a dictionary on the JSON topics, the VOEvent document as text on the VOEvent topics.
Get your user ID at https://astro-colibri.com/account.
Full details on the new Python SDK documentation page and the broker documentation page.
Gamma-ray bursts localized by the Interplanetary Network
GRBs triangulated by the Interplanetary Network (IPN) are now ingested and mapped automatically.
- IPN triangulation circulars are parsed and create their event with the GRB name, date, time and position.
- Contours are taken from the IPN HEALPix maps when available, and otherwise from the error box given in the circular.
- IPN is available in the observatory filters, in the “Other HE” category.
A clearer interface
- On the web, a new Display Settings menu gathers the colour theme, the layout edit mode and the event details view behind a single icon, and the layout edit mode offers more options to adjust the size and visibility of each area.
- The main menu and account menu were redesigned, grouped into clear sections, on the web and in the app.
- The Map Settings menu was reworked: the Moon panel and its settings are now grouped there, with renamed and reorganized options.
- The filter area was redesigned with a unified layout and a new “Hide watchlist events” option.
- Buttons to copy data are hidden by default and appear when you hover over the relevant row.
Sharper AR pointing
Augmented Reality (AR) mode places the sky more accurately, above all on Android.
- The Sun, the Moon and the planets sit at their apparent positions, correcting offsets of up to a degree from precession and the Moon’s parallax, with atmospheric refraction taken into account near the horizon.
- On Android, AR detects the Moon in the camera image and uses it to correct the bias of the phone’s sensors automatically.
- On Android, drag the sky sideways with one finger to correct the pointing by hand at any time.
- On Android, markers now stay steady while you pan: the gyroscope drives the view, and the compass only corrects it slowly, towards true north.
And remember, signing up for access to the Augmented Reality mode is a direct contribution for the continued development and operation of Astro-COLIBRI!
Also in this release
- Fermi-LAT Light Curve Repository: a plot of the spectral index evolution when it’s left free, a screenshot button in the web and mobile apps, the Astro-COLIBRI logo in the figure background, and a bug fix for the linear fit in the validation plot.
- The map of Astro-COLIBRI users around the globe now covers data through August 2026: 30,829 users in 162 countries.
- SNEWS and Super-Kamiokande supernova alerts now reach each device only once, even across several notification streams, and a SNEWS retraction gets its own notification.
- API: GET /cone_search now requires a uid and counts against the daily quota, like the POST form (kept for existing scripts, please use POST in new code). GET /latest_transients now accepts uid and returns real HTTP status codes instead of always 200. Boolean query parameters are now parsed correctly.
- Many further bug fixes and behind-the-scenes improvements.
Full changelog on our release history page.
