New Astro-COLIBRI Update – What’s New?
This is a big one! Several major developments came to a successful conclusion at the same time and are thus released together. Here’s a summary of the new features and improvements included in the latest version (v2.23.0) of Astro-COLIBRI:
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Custom Cone Searches: The cone search feature is now more flexible, supporting easier input of coordinates in various formats (deg vs HMS).
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Mobile Event Search: On mobile, you can now also load a single event and instantly explore the time period around it. You’ll find this feature in the app menu under “Event search”.
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GDPR and ToS Compliance: To comply with legal requirements, in particular the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), all users must now explicitly accept our Privacy and Terms of Service conditions. These documents have not changed, we are simply formalizing the process by explicitly requesting consent: new users will be asked during registration, and existing users will see a new pop-up and a status indicator in the menu and account settings. In short, we use your personal data solely to enable access to the platform, and commercial use of Astro-COLIBRI is not permitted without explicit agreement. As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns!
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Account Settings: Following requests by some users, you can now update your email address (used as login) and password directly from your account settings.
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Host Galaxy Characterization: A great new feature is allowing to characterize the type of host galaxy of a selected transient or catalogued source. This is possible either directly in Astro-COLIBRI via a new figure showing color–color diagram derived from WISE infrared observations. A detailed description of the used data and the graphical representation is given in this dedicated documentation page: WISE Color-Color Diagram. The diagram is available right in the Astro-COLIBRI graphical interfaces and can be retrieved via a new API endpoint (/wise_color_color). In addition, we also added a direct link to BLAST, a SCIMMA based platform that allows you to explore even more detailed host galaxy information for optical transients reported to TNS.
Photometry Features:
We have significantly expanded the features around the photometric lightcurves of the various optical transients. As before the, lightcurves are created and updated regularly for recent transients and customized version can be requested be all users. Additional features now include:
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You can now select which surveys (ASAS-SN, ATLAS, or ZTF) you want to include in your custom lightcurves.
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The full set of photometric data used for the lightcurve figures is now saved as a CSV file and can be downloaded for further analysis.
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We now extract summary information from the full lightcurve data: the first, peak, and last observations from all filters in the ZTF, ATLAS, and ASAS-SN surveys. This photometry summary is being displayed in the graphical interfaces and available for download together with the detailed data of each event.
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In addition, this summary information also allows to refine the filtering of optical transients: we have implemented searches for fast-rising and fading transients as well as filters selecting bright (or faint) transients based on the most recent observations. These filters are fully integrated into the graphical interfaces and can be access via a long-press on the SN, Classified OT, and Unclassified OT filter buttons. They are also available via the /latest_transient and /cone_search API endpoints.
Minor Improvements & Fixes:
- The Moon display now reflects the true phase and illumination. A click on the moon icon provides the illumation fraction (web interface).
- Low-significance FLaapLUC alerts, often created by spill-over effects from a central high-significance flare, are now reduced, with a new sub-filter to hide them.
- We’ve updated our list of IAU-registered observatories.
- Various bugs fixes: allow to resend account verification email, wrong sign of the declination in visibility meta-data, “Unknown parameter in the database” error in cone searches, catalog icons not displayed, missing messages when copying to clipboard, updated Fermi-GBM contours and lightcurve downloads, any many more
- Our Mastodon account has moved to a new server: mastodon.social/@astro_colibri
New External Links:
- BLAST: Explore host galaxy info for transients at blast.scimma.org.
- DAS (Data Central): Access a large range of mult-wavelength data at datacentral.org.au.
- Legacy Survey: View deep-sky images from DESI at legacysurvey.org.
- GCN Circulars: We’ve added direct links to GCN circular search results for easy access.