Occultation Portal
Stellar Occultation Campaigns by

The ERC Lucky Star Project
The ACROSS Project


The GaiaMoons Project

LIneA Occultation Predictions Database
The whole story began when I (Y. Kilic) met my Ph.D. co-supervisor Dr. Felipe Braga-Ribas during the Summer School on Astrometry and Astrometry Now and in the Future held at TÜBİTAK National Observatory in Türkiye in 2011. Years later, as our collaboration grew stronger, we discussed how to make stellar occultation campaigns significantly more efficient. With his guidance and invaluable support, the idea that eventually became the Occultation Portal was born.
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).
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.
We would like to thank Lucky Star Project/LIRA - Observatoire de Paris PSL (France), Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (Spain) and The Federal University of Technology – Paraná (Brasil) for their support of this project.
Funding: We acknowledge financial support from the Spanish I+D+i project PID2022-139555NB-I00 (TNO-JWST) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.
Support for hardware and infrastructure is made available through the following institutions: Paris (France): PADC - Paris Astronomical Data Centre, and DIO - Data and Information Observatory at Observatoire de Paris PSL. Granada (Spain): IAA-CSIC - Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía.
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 infrastructure is supported by PADC – Paris Astronomical Data Centre and DIO – Data and Information Observatory at Observatoire de Paris PSL, and IAA-CSIC – Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía.
Former supporters include Akdeniz University (Türkiye), Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), and Türkiye National Observatories.
I would like to thank my colleagues; Felipe Braga-Ribas, Renaud Savalle, Damya Souami, Murat Dindar, Orhan Erece, and Mohammed Niaei Shameoni for always being there for me and supporting me in ensuring sustainability, and H. Aziz Kayıhan for the logo design.
This page is based on the Lowell Minor Planet Services' About Page.

Questions or comments can be directed to ykilic [at] iaa.es