The Occultation Portal: A Distributed Platform for Stellar Occultations

The Occultation Portal (OP) is a scientific infrastructure originally developed within the ERC Lucky Star collaboration to support the coordination, archiving, and analysis of stellar occultation campaigns. It now provides the wider community with coordinated access to predictions, datasets, and analysis tools, and supports several international programmes, including our efforts at IAA–CSIC on trans-Neptunian objects and irregular satellites, for which occultations are essential to measure sizes, shapes, atmospheres, and ring systems.

The Portal has recently been redesigned as a distributed system, combining centralized campaign coordination and data curation with dedicated analysis capabilities for resource-intensive workflows such as astrometric alignment, photometry, light-curve extraction, and limb fitting. This architecture is designed to scale to additional sites through secure data exchange and automated synchronisation between nodes.

In the era of Gaia astrometry, DR3 and beyond, and the forthcoming LSST/Rubin survey — both driving a rapid increase in predictable stellar occultations — the OP is becoming an increasingly important data hub for the community. In this talk, I will introduce the Portal to the IAA community, present its new distributed architecture, and highlight the main scientific and technical developments behind it.

Fecha y lugar: 30/06/2026 – 12:30 | Salón de Actos
Yucel Kilic
IAA-CSIC