BLINK — SPHEREx Time Machine
NASA's SPHEREx maps the whole sky every six months in 102 near-infrared bands. Anything that moves or changes between visits — comets, asteroids, brown dwarfs, variable stars, maybe an undiscovered planet — reveals itself when you compare images taken months apart. In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto by flicking between two photographic plates in a blink comparator. BLINK rebuilds that machine for a billion objects.
How it works
- Sky map: CDS HiPS mosaics of SPHEREx Quick Release 2, streamed as tiles (Aladin Lite).
- Time Machine: every SPHEREx exposure covering your point is found through IRSA's SIA2 service; the pixels are read straight out of NASA's open-data S3 bucket with HTTP range requests (no 71 MB downloads), reprojected north-up onto a common grid, and blinked.
- Difference: each frame minus the per-pixel median of all frames. Static stars cancel; anything that moved shows up bright. Peaks above 5σ are listed as detections.
- Known objects: JPL's Small-Body Identification API lists every catalogued asteroid and comet in the field at the moment of each exposure. A mover with no label is either an artefact — or something new.
- Spectrum: SPHEREx's linear-variable filters mean each exposure sees the target at a different wavelength; aperture photometry across all frames yields a 0.75–5 µm spectrum.
Data & credits
SPHEREx data: NASA/JPL-Caltech, processed by IPAC; served by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) and the AWS Open Data Program. HiPS mosaics: CDS, Strasbourg. Ephemerides: NASA/JPL SSD. Name resolution: CDS Sesame. Built for the 2026 NASA Space Apps Challenge — Planet X and SPHEREx.