Occultation Portal
Stellar Occultation Campaigns by

The ERC Lucky Star Project
Lucky Star
The ERC Lucky Star Project
The ACROSS Project
ACROSS
The ACROSS Project


The GaiaMoons Project
GaiaMoons
The GaiaMoons Project
CORA
CORA
Collaborative Occultation Resources and Archive

LIneA Occultation Predictions Database
LIneA
Occultation Predictions Database
IAA-CSIC
IAA-CSIC
Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía
The stellar occultation technique is a unique and reliable method to investigate the size, shape, and environment around Solar System objects. One of the indispensables of this technique is multi-chord observations. Sometimes collecting observational data and equipment details from observers affects prolonged research time. For this reason, we aimed to create a common online platform where the needed data will be collected and analyzed (producing light curves/photometry) in a single center for ongoing campaign observations.
Occultation Portal is a web-based astronomical archive and analysis platform for the fast, efficient, and centralized management of occultation observation campaigns coordinated by the Lucky Star Project. This platform is a scientific initiative conducted in partnership with the LIRA - Observatoire de Paris PSL (France), Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (Spain), and The Federal University of Technology – Paraná (Brazil).

  1. A collaboration begins

    Y. Kilic met his Ph.D. co-supervisor, Felipe Braga-Ribas, at the summer school on astrometry held at TÜBİTAK National Observatory in Türkiye. Their collaboration later inspired the idea of a shared platform for stellar occultation campaigns.

  2. Development takes shape

    The first repository commit marks the start of the Portal's recorded software development.

  3. The Portal goes live

    Occultation Portal launched with computing infrastructure provided by TÜBİTAK National Observatory.

  4. The Portal concept is published

    Kilic et al. (2022), published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, presents the Portal's concept, design, and workflow for coordinating stellar occultation campaigns and collecting and analysing observations.

  5. A new home at Observatoire de Paris

    The Portal migrated to servers at Observatoire de Paris PSL, supported by PADC and DIO.

  6. The IAA-CSIC analysis node

    An analysis node was established at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, expanding the Portal's computing infrastructure.

This project is powered by the following FREE/open source softwares.

Debian GNU/Linux
Debian is a free operating system developed by the Debian Project.
Python
Python is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language.
Django
Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Astropy
The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a common core package for Astronomy in Python and foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages.
NumPy
NumPy is an open source project aiming to enable numerical computing with Python.
Matplotlib
Matplotlib is a plotting library for the Python programming language and its numerical mathematics extension NumPy.
Astropy
Photutils is an affiliated package of Astropy that primarily provides tools for detecting and performing photometry of astronomical sources.
IRAF
IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory geared towards the reduction of astronomical images in pixel array form.
PyRAF
PyRAF is a command language for running IRAF tasks that is based on the Python scripting language.
MYRaf Project
The MYRaf is a practicable astronomical image reduction and photometry software and interface for IRAF.
SExtractor
SExtractor (Source-Extractor) is a program that builds a catalog of objects from an astronomical image.
Highcharts
Javascript library to create interactive charts for web and mobile projects.

JS9
JS9 brings astronomical image display to your browser and desktop: display FITS images, tables, data cubes, multi-extension files.
NGINX
NginX, is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS- and JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other interface components.
DataTables
DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, built upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, that adds all of these advanced features to any HTML table.
Aladin Sky Atlas
Aladin lite is a lightweight version of the Aladin tool, running in the browser and geared towards simple visualization of a sky region.
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable geographic database of the world. The geodata underlying the maps is considered the primary output of the project.
Django Ninja
Django Ninja is a web framework for building APIs with Django and Python 3.6+.
OW Cloud
Occult Watcher Cloud (OWC).
EUMETSAT
This service is based on EUMETSAT Meteosat data/products 2026.
Google Services
Google services are used for reCAPTCHA and Maps integrations.
SORA
SORA (Stellar Occultation Reduction and Analysis) is a Python package designed to analyse stellar occultation data, from light curve fitting to shape modelling.
Astrometry.net
Astrometry.net provides automated astrometric calibration, solving images by matching star patterns to sky catalogues.
Citing the Occultation Portal: For academic use, please cite the following paper:
Y Kilic, F Braga-Ribas, M Kaplan, O Erece, D Souami, M Dindar, J Desmars, B Sicardy, B E Morgado, M N Shameoni, F L Rommel, A R Gomes-Júnior, Occultation portal: A web-based platform for data collection and analysis of stellar occultations, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 515, Issue 1, September 2022, Pages 1346–1357, DOI | NASA/ADS.
Acknowledgement text: When publishing results based on data collected or analysed through the Occultation Portal, please include the following acknowledgement in your paper:

The authors acknowledge the use of the Occultation Portal, whose development, hosting, maintenance, and infrastructure are supported by the Paris Astronomical Data Centre (PADC), the Direction Informatique de l’Observatoire de Paris (DIO), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), and the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR).

Scientific collaboration

We thank Felipe Braga-Ribas, José Luis Ortiz, Bruno Sicardy, and Josselin Desmars for their scientific guidance and sustained support for the Portal's development.

Launch infrastructure in Türkiye

We thank the Information Systems Group at TÜBİTAK National Observatory, particularly its lead, Murat Dindar, for their invaluable support in making the Portal’s launch possible.

Hosting at Observatoire de Paris

We thank the Paris Astronomical Data Centre (PADC) and the Direction Informatique de l’Observatoire de Paris (DIO) at Observatoire de Paris PSL for hosting and infrastructure support. We are grateful to Damya Souami and Renaud Savalle for their continued assistance with hosting and infrastructure.

Portal development

The Portal’s development has benefited from support for Y. Kilic’s work at IAA-CSIC through the Spanish I+D+i project PID2022-139555NB-I00 (TNO-JWST) and, currently, the Severo Ochoa grant CEX2021-001131-S, both funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. We thank IAA-CSIC for its institutional support, Pablo Santos-Sanz, principal investigator of TNO-JWST, for his support and encouragement, and the Severo Ochoa programme for its continued support.

We thank Rafael Morales and Nico Robles for their support in hosting the IAA-CSIC analysis node.

Further acknowledgements

We thank Orhan Erece, and Mohammed Niaei Shameoni for their continued contributions, and H. Aziz Kayıhan for the logo design.

This page was originally based on the Lowell Minor Planet Services About page.

Questions or comments can be directed to opop.support@sympa.obspm.fr