Speakers
Description
Arrays of Cherenkov telescopes detect ultra-short (nanosecond) flashes of blue light produced when high-energy gamma rays hit Earth’s atmosphere, triggering particle cascades. The upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will generate hundreds of petabytes of data annually, requiring extensive atmospheric monitoring and rich metadata to reconstruct event lists, images, spectra, and light curves. These “software telescopes” depend on complex pipelines and statistical models, not just the instrument and acquisition settings, but also the full processing configuration and detailed provenance, making precise data and processing descriptions critical.
We developed an open-source web platform that enables data search, visualisation and quick-look analysis of Cherenkov Astronomy data products. This platform manages all the necessary metadata to support search criteria adapted to the specific nature of Cherenkov data. Built on the Virtual Observatory framework, the platform implements the IVOA ObsCore standard to describe the spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics of observations. Additionally, we are contributing to a High-Energy extension of ObsCore, enhancing its capacity to describe high-energy Cherenkov data.
The platform couples a FastAPI micro-service layer to a React front-end, with authentication based on the OpenID Connect standard. The metadata is exposed via an IVOA TAP server receiving IVOA ADQL queries. The matched products are returned in a sortable table, plotted on an Aladin Lite sky map, and through interactive Plotly charts of temporal and energy coverage. Signed-in users benefit from a reproducible search workflow: all ADQL requests are stored in a PostgreSQL database and can be replayed to regenerate identical results. Selected records can be collected into persistent “baskets” — named lists preserved across sessions for reuse.
Open-source licence and strict adherence to IVOA standards ensure alignment of the platform with FAIR and open-science principles.
| Affiliation of the submitter | LUX, CNRS, Observatoire de Paris |
|---|---|
| Attendance | in-person |
