About the Open Supernova Catalog (sne.space)

Mission & Philosophy

Before the creation of the Open Supernova Catalog (OSC), transient astronomy suffered from severe data fragmentation. Light curves, spectra, and metadata were scattered across hundreds of research journals, private institutional websites, survey archives, and IAU circulars.

Founded by James Guillochon, Jerod Parrent, Matt Nicholl, and Edo Berger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Open Supernova Catalog was engineered to unite every published piece of supernova data into a unified, extensible schema. sne.space delivers zero-token, open-access astrophysics to human researchers and autonomous AI agents alike.

Core Architecture

⚡

Unified AstroCats Schema

Every transient is serialized in a rigorous, schema-validated JSON format tracking multi-band photometry, spectroscopy, multiple claimed types, host galaxies, coordinates, and exact provenance citations.

JSON Schema v1.0

🔭

Automated Alert Ingestion

Automated pipelines cross-correlate alerts from the IAU Transient Name Server (TNS), Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), ATLAS, Pan-STARRS, ASAS-SN, Gaia, and WISeREP, resolving naming conflicts and deduplicating events.

Multi-Survey Harvester

🤖

AI Agent Native (MCP & WebMCP)

First-class integration for autonomous LLMs and research agents. Exposes standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) JSON-RPC 2.0 endpoints, in-browser WebMCP declarative forms, and ARD discovery manifests.

W3C / FastMCP

Historical Milestones

2017

Publication of the Open Supernova Catalog Paper

Published in The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ 835, 64) establishing the open-data standard for transient astronomy and indexing the first 35,000+ objects.

2020 – 2024

Wide-Field Survey Surge

Catalog expands past 80,000 events powered by high-cadence robotic synoptic sky surveys including ZTF, ATLAS, and Pan-STARRS.

2026+

Next-Gen Rebuild & Agentic MCP Ecosystem

Launch of the modern high-concurrency sne.space architecture: Sub-millisecond IVOA 3D Cartesian cone search, interactive Canvas/WebGL light curve plots, Aladin Lite v3 sky viewers, and dual FastMCP / WebMCP agent tools.

Scientific Citation & Attribution

If you use data or tools from the Open Supernova Catalog in academic publications, thesis dissertations, or astronomical research, please cite the primary literature paper:

@ARTICLE{2017ApJ...835...64G,
   author = {{Guillochon}, James and {Parrent}, Jerod and {Kelley}, Luke Zoltan and 
             {Margutti}, Raffaella and {Nicholl}, Matt and {Villar}, V. Ashley and 
             {Artale}, Maria Celeste and {Blanchard}, Peter K. and {Bostroem}, K. Azalee and 
             {Challis}, Peter and {Chornock}, Ryan and {Czekala}, Ian and 
             {Fox}, Ori D. and {Garnavich}, Peter M. and {Graham}, Melissa L. and 
             {Hiramatsu}, Daichi and {Kirshner}, Robert P. and {Milisavljevic}, Dan and 
             {Rest}, Armin and {Veras}, Dimitri and {Berger}, Edo},
    title = "{An Open Catalog for Supernova Data}",
  journal = {\apj},
 keywords = {catalogs, supernovae: general},
     year = 2017,
    month = feb,
   volume = {835},
   number = {1},
      eid = {64},
    pages = {64},
      doi = {10.3847/1538-4357/835/1/64},
   adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017ApJ...835...64G},
  adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

Ecosystem & Repositories

GitHub Source Code

Explore the complete source code behind the sne.space server, AstroCats data model, and ingestion harvesters on GitHub.

github.com/astrocatalogs/astrocats →

Developer APIs

Read the official API documentation for single-event endpoints, bulk downloads, IVOA cone searches, and MCP client setups.

Browse API & Docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Detailed explanations regarding cosmological distance derivations, apparent magnitudes, spectral classification, and data formats.

Explore FAQs →

The Open Supernova Catalog