The SNAD Viewer: Everything You Want to Know about Your Favorite ZTF Object

Abstract

We describe the SNAD Viewer, a web portal for astronomers which presents a centralized view of individual objects from the Zwicky Transient Facility's (ZTF) data releases, including data gathered from multiple publicly available astronomical archives and data sources. Initially built to enable efficient expert feedback in the context of adaptive machine learning applications, it has evolved into a full-fledged community asset that centralizes public information and provides a multi-dimensional view of ZTF sources. For users, we provide detailed descriptions of the data sources and choices underlying the information displayed in the portal. For developers, we describe our architectural choices and their consequences such that our experience can help others engaged in similar endeavors or in adapting our publicly released code to their requirements. The infrastructure we describe here is scalable and flexible and can be personalized and used by other surveys and for other science goals. The Viewer has been instrumental in highlighting the crucial roles domain experts retain in the era of big data in astronomy. Given the arrival of the upcoming generation of large-scale surveys, we believe similar systems will be paramount in enabling an optimal exploitation of the scientific potential enclosed in current terabyte and future petabyte-scale data sets. The Viewer is publicly available online at https://ztf.snad.space

21 pages, 9 figures. Published in PASP

References in corpus (22)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Gaia mission
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3
• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing
• The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0
• Achieving better than 1 minute accuracy in the Heliocentric and Barycentric Julian Dates
• astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Photometric content and validation
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler
• The Zwicky Transient Facility Catalog of Periodic Variable Stars
• SPICY: The Spitzer/IRAC Candidate YSO Catalog for the Inner Galactic Midplane
• The ANTARES Astronomical Time-Domain Event Broker
• Anomaly detection in the Zwicky Transient Facility DR3
• Searching for changing-state AGNs in massive datasets -- I: applying deep learning and anomaly detection techniques to find AGNs with anomalous variability behaviours
• Year 1 of the ZTF high-cadence Galactic Plane Survey: Strategy, goals, and early results on new single-mode hot subdwarf B-star pulsators
• Gaia GraL: Gaia DR2 Gravitational Lens Systems. VI. Spectroscopic Confirmation and Modeling of Quadruply-Imaged Lensed Quasars
• The Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program: Cosmological biases from supernova photometric classification
• Four new deeply-eclipsing white dwarfs in ZTF
• SNAD Transient Miner: Finding Missed Transient Events in ZTF DR4 using k-D trees

Cited by in corpus (11)

• YSE-PZ: A Transient Survey Management Platform that Empowers the Human-in-the-Loop
• Supernova search with active learning in ZTF DR3
• SNAD catalogue of M-dwarf flares from the Zwicky Transient Facility
• A new redback pulsar candidate 4FGL J2054.2+6904
• Early Identification of Optical Tidal Disruption Events: A science module for the Fink broker
• A Data-Driven Search For Mid-Infrared Excesses Among Five Million Main-Sequence FGK Stars
• TCP J07222683$+$6220548: a new AM CVn type system with infrequent outbursts
• Real-bogus scores for active anomaly detection
• Photometric Analysis of TCP J20171288$+$1156589 -- WZ Sge Type Dwarf Nova with Delayed Ordinary Superhumps Emergence
• Exploring the Universe with SNAD: Anomaly Detection in Astronomy
• XMM-Newton follow-up of two eROSITA X-ray binary candidates