The ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility)  is a wide-field sky astronomical survey using a camera attached to the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. Commissioned in 2017, it observes in visible and infra-red wavelengths. It is designed to detect transient objects that rapidly change in brightness, for example supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and moving objects like comets and asteroids.


Peranso lets you plot ZTF light curves directly through the Internet by clicking on the Add ZTF light curve button in the ObsWin toolbar. This supports two sources of ZTF observations:


    • Using Lasair: Lasair is a broker for astronomers studying transient and variable astrophysical sources. It is being developed as a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Queen's University, Belfast to build a broker service for alerts generated by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera Rubin Telescope. 

    • Using NASA IRSA: the NASA Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) is the primary archive for the infrared and submillimeter astronomical projects of NASA, the space agency of the United States. As of 2019, IRSA provides access to more than 1 petabyte of data consisting of roughly 1 trillion astronomical measurements, which span wavelengths from 1 micron to 10 millimeters and include all-sky coverage in 24 bands.

There is an important difference between both sources: IRSA provides archival data of ZTF, so not the latest observations, whereas Lasair provides nearly instant access to also the most recent ZTF observations. However, our experience tells that the IRSA ZTF observations generally are of higher quality than the Lasair ZTF data. Hence, depending on the type of information you are looking for, you will have to select between both sources


Peranso furthermore allows to import ZTF text files.



We acknowledge with thanks the services provided by Lasair and recommend following paper:  Lasair: The Transient Alert Broker for LSST:UK K. W. Smith, R. D. Williams et. al., Research Notes AAS, 3,26 (2019). 


We acknowledge with thanks the services provided by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology.