The Atlas Series · Observational Data · v1.4 · facility-level spectral audit 2026-07-30

What, exactly, does a telescope capture?

Not “an image.” A detector records charge ramps, photon events, voltages, phases, timestamps, pointing states, and calibration exposures. Pipelines turn those into images, spectra, cubes, light curves, catalogs, physical parameters, and thousands of quality-aware fields. This atlas maps that full chain—facility by facility and field by field.

“The sky sends a signal. Everything after that is a data product with a lineage.”

89facility profiles
27data families
—named concepts
—field definitions
The universal anatomy

Signal → meaning, without skipping a layer

Select a stage to focus it across the whole atlas—the matrix column group, the facility profile, and the field dictionary. This distinction matters: parallax is solved from many Gaia CCD transits; redshift is fit from a spectrum; an alert classification is an inference—not a direct detector reading.

01 · cross-observatory view

The data-family matrix

Rows are facilities; columns are data families, grouped by the six stages above. A filled cell means the facility’s capture-to-science chain contains that family—not that every product is downloadable today or was recorded directly. Profiles distinguish current public holdings, official-pipeline derivatives, and scheduled products.

Select any row to open that facility’s profile · rows are keyboard-navigable with ↑ ↓ and Enter

02 · telescope by telescope

Detector-to-discovery profiles

03 · reusable schema

Astronomical field dictionary

These are the recurring coordinates, measurements, uncertainties, masks, calibrations, and inferred quantities found across archives. Names vary by mission; meanings often rhyme.

04 · files are part of the science

How the data lands on disk

The same scientific quantity can arrive as a multidimensional image extension, a binary table row, a database column, or a streaming packet. Format determines how you query and validate it.

05 · boundaries & method

What “all data” means here

Scope

This atlas inventories science-relevant data classes, not every telemetry mnemonic or every column in every release. The unit is a meaningful measurement or product family: detector ramps, visibilities, event lists, WCS, extracted spectra, covariance, classifications, and the like. Field names shown in facility profiles are representative and intentionally preserve mission vocabulary. The matrix describes each facility’s end-to-end data chain; availability is release-dependent, and scheduled products are labeled in their profiles.

  • Captured means recorded by detector or observatory telemetry.
  • Measured means calibrated or fitted from captured samples.
  • Inferred means model-dependent physical interpretation.
  • Delivered means exposed in a public archive, release, or science-ready package.

Do not erase provenance

A catalog value without its uncertainty, flag, calibration context, epoch, pipeline version, and selection function is an incomplete observation. Null is not zero. A non-detection is not a flux of zero. A coadd is not an epoch. A model parameter is not a detector count. Covariance can dominate a derived result even when every individual error bar looks small.

06 · primary documentation

Official data models & handbooks

Product names and schema examples are grounded in facility documentation. Archive schemas evolve; follow the linked release documentation before production analysis.