We are happy to share with you the latest developments at Astro Data Lab in this June 2025 newsletter!

In this newsletter

• New Integrated Web Portal
• Data Lab at AAS 246 in Anchorage, Alaska
• Annual user survey
• New datasets at Data Lab
• New Jupyter notebooks

New Integrated Web Portal

The first version of a new portal for Astro Data Lab was launched in May. This new portal integrates many of Data Lab's capabilities in data discovery, processing, and analysis, including access to a user's remote data files and database tables, lookup of survey table properties, a powerful query interface with export capabilities, and a convenient image search and cutout tool.

View the new Data Explorer here!

 

Data Lab at AAS 246 in Anchorage, Alaska

Astro Data Lab will be present at the AAS 246 summer meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. Make sure to visit us at booth #308, conveniently located next to the iPosters. Stop by the booth to grab new Data Lab postcards and engage in discussion with team member Brian Merino about our new web portal! Whether you have questions about Data Lab or are interested in learning how to create your free Data Lab account, we are here to help!

Drop by booth #308 during any of the following times for a demo of the new web portal:

• Monday, June 09:
  • 10 am - 1 pm
  • 2 pm - 4 pm
• Tuesday, June 10:
  • 10:10 am - 1 pm
  • 2 pm - 4 pm
• Wednesday, June 11:
  • 10 am -1 pm
  • 2 pm - 4 pm
• Thursday, June 12:
  • 10 am -12 pm

Annual user survey

The Data Lab will send its first annual user survey to active users this summer. This is your chance to voice your thoughts and help shape the future of the Data Lab. We want to hear about what you love, what needs work, and which datasets or tools you’d like to see added to our offerings. The survey will gauge which tools are used the most, whether you have used our new web portal, and what kind of data (galactic, exoplanetary, stars, etc.) you would like to see more of. It also allows you to inform the Data Lab team about issues you have faced when using the tools, or let us know what improvements you would like us to make. Completing the survey will only take 4-7 minutes, and your feedback is invaluable in enhancing our services. So keep an eye out for the survey, which will be sent out this Summer!

New datasets at Data Lab

DESI DR1

The First Data Release of DESI contains spectra and catalogs for more than 18 million unique targets from the first 13 months of the main survey ("Year 1") as well as a reprocessing of the same commissioning and survey validation (SV) data that were previously released as part of EDR. Information about the data release is presented in the DR1 Overview paper (DESI Collaboration et al. 2025). Astro Data Lab also hosts the Value-Added Catalog (VAC) desi_dr1.agnqso. It includes DESI DR1 galaxies and quasars from all targets (MWS, BGS, LRG, ELG, QSO as well as secondary targets; Myers et al. 2023). Visit the DESI landing page for more information.

SDSS DR8 - Galaxy Properties for DR8 spectra from MPA-JHU

We have added four new value-added SDSS tables: galspecInfo, galspecLine, galspecIndx, and galspecExtra. They contain the "galSpec" galaxy properties from MPA-JHU. These properties are deprecated in favor of the Wisconsin, Portsmouth, and Granada team analyses of the same data, but are provided in DR17 for comparison. Visit the SDSS landing page for more information.

Euclid ERO

The Euclid Early Release Observations (ERO) showcase Euclid's capabilities in advance of its main mission, targeting 17 astronomical objects, from galaxy clusters, nearby galaxies, globular clusters, to star-forming regions observed with both the Visible Camera (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instruments. They report a point spread function (PSF) with a full width at half maximum of 0.''16 in the optical Iₑ-band, and 0.''19 in the near-infrared (NIR) bands Yₑ, Jₑ, and Hₑ. Astro Data Lab hosts the Euclid ERO source catalogs, organized by the observed field and the instrument used. There are a total of 34 tables in the euclid_ero schema, each described on the Euclid landing page. Note that unlike other datasets, we did not produce pre-crossmatched tables for this dataset.

Euclid Q1

The first Euclid Quick Data Release, Q1, comprises 63.1 square degrees of the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs) to nominal wide-survey depth. It encompasses visible and near-infrared space-based imaging and spectroscopic data, ground-based photometry in the u, g, r, i, and z bands, as well as corresponding masks. Overall, Q1 contains about 30 million objects in three areas near the ecliptic poles around the EDF-North and EDF-South, as well as the EDF-Fornax field in the constellation of the same name. Visit the Euclid landing page for more information.

DECaPS DR1 Measurements table

DECaPS provides two types of main catalogs: individual-image catalogs and band-merged catalogs. We have had the latter table for a while at Data Lab. The new table is the individual catalog which is the output of crowdsource on the individual DECam CCDs. The individual epoch catalogs are available for every DECaPS image. You can see the table and column descriptions in our Data Explorer.

DECaPS DR2 Stellar Inference table

As a value added catalog, this table contains DECaPS constraints on the distances, extinctions, and stellar types for 709 million stars used in the construction of the DECaPS 3D dust map from Zucker, Saydjari, & Speagle et al. 2025.S. This catalog is a crossmatch of the DECaPS2, VVV, 2MASS, unWISE, and Gaia DR3 surveys using the Large Survey Database (LSD) architecture (Juric 2012). DECaPS2 serves as the primary catalog for the astrometry, meaning we find photometry and astrometry for sources in the other catalogs that crossmatch to detections in DECaPS2, adopting a crossmatch radius of 0.5". More information can be found in Zucker et al.

DES Y6 Gold Zeropoint table

The DES Y6 Gold Zeropoint table is available at Astro Data Lab in the DES DR2 schema as des_dr2.y6_gold_zeropoint. The Zeropoint table can support multiple calibrations of the same data and even multiple, differing, reductions of the same raw inputs. The y6_gold_zeropoint table has pre-selected the zeropoints to a specific version of the data reduction and calibration process (that is, source='FGCM' and version='y6a1_v2.1' for all entries). FGCM is described by Burke et al. 2017.

GOGREEN and GCLASS DR2

This is the second Public Data Release (DR2) of all GOGREEN and GCLASS data. It includes new photometric data and catalogues for one cluster, SpARCS1033. In addition some minor errors in DR1 have been fixed. A description of the changes from DR1 can be found in this document. The data structure and content is largely the same as DR1. Any use of these data should cite the published DR1 paper. Visit the GOGREEN and GCLASS landing page for more information.

 

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Data Lab cross-matched tables

The Data Lab team has already cross-matched the DESI DR1 "zpix" table, the Euclid Q1 "object" table, and the GOGREEN DR2 "photo" and "redshift" tables with our reference datasets: Gaia DR3 (for astrometry), AllWISE, NSC DR2, unWISE DR1 (for photometry), and SDSS DR17 (for spectroscopy), and vice versa. We have also added a few other useful columns such as nest4096, ring256, and htm9 for sky tessellation use cases. The pre-crossmatched tables are accessible in the Catalogs section of the Data Explorer, and through standard TAP/SQL/ADQL queries, like all other catalogs at Data Lab.

Dataset requests

The Data Lab team evaluates periodically which external survey datasets we should source, ingest, and serve. We appreciate requests and suggestions from our users. Please contact us at datalab@noirlab.edu to send your request and, if possible, mention an example scientific use case.

New Jupyter notebooks

Several new notebooks were recently added to Data Lab's extensive collection of notebooks for our user community:

Searching for extremely metal-poor stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Author: Alice Jacques

The goal of this notebook is to replicate the investigation done in the paper Oh et al. 2023 to find extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars ([Fe/H]≤−3.0) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using the latest SkyMapper data release SkyMapper DR4 (the paper uses DR3). We follow the same steps and apply the same data constraints as Oh et al. 2023 by using SkyMapper photometry, parallax and proper motion cuts from Gaia, color-magnitude cuts, and a metallicity-sensitive cut. We then obtain the radial velocity values from APOGEE-2 for our candidates and compare them to the LMC rotation curve to confirm their Magellanic membership. This notebook uses our own publicly available tables hosted at Astro Data Lab.

The figure on the right shows radial velocity as a function of position angle in the LMC (measured east of north) for our 10 EMP LMC candidates (marked with green triangles). The EMP targets from Reggiani et al. 2021 and from Oh et al. 2023 are also plotted for reference. The black sinusoid shows the LMC rotation model derived from carbon stars in the outer LMC disc (van der Marel et al. 2002) that sit at radii similar to the majority of our EMP sample. Compare this plot with Figure 3 in Oh et al. 2023.

How to Query DESI DR1 Data

Authors: Benjamin Weaver, Alice Jacques, and the Astro Data Lab Team

This notebook covers the basics of using the DESI spectroscopic production database, desi_dr1, which contains the outputs of the DESI pipeline. This notebook is intended to cover as much of the detail of DESI's introductory notebook tutorial as possible, although rewritten for the Data Lab environment. For more details, including detailed table descriptions, see DESI's database access page.

Contact us

You can visit our website, use the helpdesk, reach us via email at datalab@noirlab.edu, and follow us on BlueSky.