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SPHEREx frames

Asking IRSA which SPHEREx images saw this patch of sky.
Downloading a cutout of every visit (about 4 MB each) and turning them all north up.
Placing Gaia's predicted position on every date.

The first time for a patch of sky this takes a few minutes. Next time it opens in seconds. Elapsed 0:00

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Band

Legend

Predicted (Gaia DR3)
Measured centroid
Path between dates
Flagged pixels

Frame

Date
Wavelength
Detector
Release
Position angle
Measured vs Gaia

Roll
Core
vs Gaia
Wavelength

What moved

Object

Barnard's Star

Data & Astrometry Citations

Scientific Warnings & Notes

How these frames were made

Asked the NASA/IPAC archive (IRSA) which SPHEREx images cover the star (DR1 + QR3).
Kept one image per visit, all seeing the star at nearly the same wavelength.
Removed the zodiacal light model and put every image on one grid with north up. Two visits saw the sky rotated 180°; this undoes it.
Applied the same brightness stretch (asinh) to every frame, so blinking stays fair.
Moved Gaia DR3's position to each date (proper motion + parallax) and compared it with the measured center of the star.

Credits

SPHEREx data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SPHEREx, via NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). SPHEREx DR1: doi:10.26131/IRSA678. The sky layers "SPHEREx 4.77 µm" and "SPHEREx false colour" come from IRSA's SPHEREx DR1 all-sky data cube, an average of 24 April 2025 to 14 May 2026.

Visible sky: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, "Deep Star Maps 2020". Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.

Astrometry: ESA Gaia DR3. Object names and their positions: SIMBAD (CDS), through its mirror at Harvard.

Built by team Bortle Cero for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026 · Apache 2.0.

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