Hi all,
We’re happy to announce the release of Astro-COLIBRI v2.33.0! Every event type now has its own illustrated icon, a new onboarding and a guided tour of the live interface help you get started, and gamma-ray bursts detected by Fermi-GBM come with an Amati relation figure. Astro-COLIBRI also keeps a permanent archive of the Swift-XRT afterglow light curves, and the Python SDK learned to parse VOEvents.
Here are the highlights of this release:
New event icons and visual identity: recognize event types at a glance on the event cards, in the home screen widgets and in the redesigned notification settings.
New onboarding and guided tour: five short screens to customize Astro-COLIBRI for you, then a walk-through of the live interface, in the app and on the web.
Amati relation for Fermi-GBM bursts: see where a burst falls in the Ep,z - Eiso plane, as a single point or as a track over redshift.
Swift-XRT afterglow archive: figures and data are kept permanently, with the data points available as CSV or JSON download.
VOEvent parsing in the Python SDK: astro-colibri 1.2.0 turns our VOEvents and GCN notices into Python values, available via PyPI and GitHub.
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
New event icons and visual identity
Every class of transient now has newly, custom designed icons:
- The icons appear on the event cards, in the onboarding, in the home screen widgets on iOS and Android, and in the event dictionary of the documentation.
- The notification settings were redesigned around them: alert topics are grouped in fold-out cards, and each card shows how many topics you selected in that group.
New onboarding and guided tour
Five short configuration screens replace the old tutorial and help you make Astro-COLIBRI your own.
- Choose Discover for plain-language event summaries, or Science for full event details and research tools.
- Pick the alerts you want to receive and set your observer location on the world map.
- Create an account if you do not have one yet.
- Then take the guided tour: bubbles point out the sky map, the event list, cone search, visibility and event information, directly on the live interface.
The web works the same way: a first visit starts a short configuration guide, followed by a guided tour of the interface.
Want to see it again? In the app, open the menu, then Help & about and Restart tutorial. On the web, open the information button and choose Take the guided tour.
Amati relation for Fermi-GBM gamma-ray bursts
Put a gamma-ray burst in context. The new figure places it in the Ep,z - Eiso plane, the rest-frame spectral peak energy against the isotropic-equivalent energy, together with the archive of long and short GRBs from Lan et al. (2023).
- With a known redshift, the burst is a single point with its Eiso and Ep,z.
- Without one, a coloured track shows how the burst moves through the diagram for redshifts between 0.01 and 5, alongside the Type I and Type II populations.
- The figure is updated automatically once a redshift is reported in a GCN circular.
- Fluence, Epeak and spectral indices are read from the Band or cutoff power-law fit in the Fermi-GBM circular.
Look for Amati relation in the event details when a figure is available.
Swift-XRT afterglow archive
Astro-COLIBRI now keeps its own permanent copy of the Swift-XRT afterglow figures and data, so they stay available after the end of the Swift mission.
- Download the XRT data points as CSV or JSON: unabsorbed 0.3-10 keV flux, with the UKSSDC provenance.
- The archive also covers bursts from other missions that Swift followed up, for example Einstein Probe events.
VOEvent parsing in the Python SDK
astro-colibri 1.2.0 parses VOEvents for you: the time as a UTC datetime, the position in degrees and every parameter as a Python value, with no extra dependency. On a broker topic, alert.voevent() does it in one call:
consumer.subscribe(["astrocolibri.all.VOEvent"])
for alert in consumer.consume():
event = alert.voevent()
if event.is_test:
continue
print(event.name, event.time, event.position)
For an event from the API, or any VOEvent file:
from astrocolibri import Client, parse_voevent
with Client() as client:
event = parse_voevent(client.get_event_voevent("S230518h"))
event.get("area_90") # 436.0, a float
- The parser follows the VOEvent standard, so it also reads the notices GCN distributes (Swift, Fermi, LVK, SVOM, IceCube, …).
- Heads-up: the VOEvents from the broker and from
/get_event_as_voevent now fully validate against the IVOA VOEvent 2.0 schema. If you parse them with voe:-prefixed element names, drop the prefix.
- Upgrade with
pip install --upgrade astro-colibri. The SDK documentation has the full reference, and examples/parse_voevent.py is a script to start from.
Minor improvements and bug fixes
- Updated design of the support / augmented reality access paywall
- The IAU observatory search in the observer location works again
- Space weather: the DONKI event summary works again after NASA/CCMC moved the service
- The observing conditions and aurora panels and widgets now give times in UTC, as everywhere else in Astro-COLIBRI
- Fermi-LAT Light Curve Repository: the scale of the flux axis is set automatically, the web screenshot captures the figure correctly and the info box stays inside the screen
- Tilepy scheduling: schedules are cached and shared between users, and each registered user can request 5 new schedules per day
