Passbands, sky coverage, processing levels and archive access for 55 facilities, from pulsar timing arrays and kilometre-scale interferometers to grazing-incidence X-ray optics in orbit. Each entry traces the data from detector to catalogue and links to the primary archive.
James Webb Space Telescope
6.5 m of cryogenic aperture out to 28 µm: galaxies at z > 10 and the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets.
The “Cosmic Cliffs” at the edge of NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula, NIRCam, 2022. NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI, CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)
Hubble Space Telescope
Diffraction-limited from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared for more than 35 years, and the only large ultraviolet spectroscopic capability in orbit.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field: nearly 10,000 galaxies in a field 3.1′ across; the smallest and reddest may date from when the Universe was about 800 million years old. NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team, CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)
Chandra X-ray Observatory
Sub-arcsecond X-ray optics: still the sharpest view of hot plasma, accretion and shocks.
Cassiopeia A, the debris of a star seen to explode over 300 years ago; red, green and blue map low, medium and high X-ray energies. NASA/CXC/SAO, No copyright claimed; NASA usage guidelines (opens in a new tab)
Microarcsecond-class astrometry for 1.8 billion sources: the reference frame, distances and kinematics of the Milky Way.
The sky from 1.7 billion sources in Gaia DR2, 2018. ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO (opens in a new tab)
Weak lensing over a third of the sky: the expansion and growth history that dark energy and dark matter imprint.
The Perseus cluster in Euclid's first images: about 1,000 cluster members and over 100,000 background galaxies. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO (opens in a new tab)
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
Near-all-sky time-series photometry, sector by sector: the main source of transiting planets around bright stars.
Every sector observed so far, in ecliptic coordinates; exposure accumulates where sectors overlap and peaks in the continuous viewing zones at the poles. Drawn by SATLAS from tesswcs pointings (opens in a new tab)
Vera C. Rubin Observatory
8.4 m and a 9.6 deg² field: a ten-year, 800-visit movie of the southern sky, with alerts in 60 seconds.
The Trifid and Lagoon nebulae in Rubin's First Look images, 2025. NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA, CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)
Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
Millimetre interferometry down to a few milliarcseconds: the cold dust and molecular gas where stars and planets form.
HL Tauri's protoplanetary disc from the 2014 Long Baseline Campaign; the gaps are thought to be carved by forming planets. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
Opened gravitational-wave astronomy with GW150914, a binary black-hole merger about 410 Mpc away.
A leading-order inspiral chirp for GW150914's detector-frame chirp mass of about 30 M☉; drawn from the parameters, not the recorded strain. Drawn by SATLAS (opens in a new tab)
SATLAS