The Occultation Portal (OP) is a scientific infrastructure originally developed within the ERC Lucky Star collaboration with groups from Paris, Meudon, Granada and Rio, and is now actively used in ongoing occultation-focused projects such as ACROSS and GaiaMoons. It supports the full workflow of stellar occultation studies, including prediction and campaign coordination, as well as the ingestion, validation, and long-term archiving of both video-based and photometric observations. With upcoming surveys such as LSST and future Gaia releases expected to significantly increase the number of observable events, ensuring the scalability and operational robustness of the OP has become essential.
Over the past six months, the platform has undergone a major technical modernisation, including a full MD5-based data-integrity framework, GDPR-compliant handling of user and observatory in- formation, a redesigned user-registration and moderation workflow, an upgraded publication system with ADS-powered metadata ingestion linking scientific outputs to OP events and archived data, and extended prediction and mapping tools. These developments significantly strengthen the platform’s long-term stability and ensure that the OP remains a reliable infrastructure for advancing stellar occultation science.
Yücel Kılı¸c1,2, Renaud Savalle 3, and Damya Souami 2
- 1 Instituto de Astrof´ısica de Andaluc´ıa (CSIC), Granada, Spain
- 2 LIRA, Observatoire de Paris, PSL University, France
- 3 PADC/DIO, Observatoire de Paris, PSL University, France
Acknowledgements
We thank the API–ProAm collaborations for their continued engagement and for financially sup- porting the migration of the Occultation Portal. We also thank the LIRA laboratory and the PADC/DIO division of the Paris Observatory for providing the computational infrastructure and sustained technical support that enabled the platform’s deployment and institutional integration. We further acknowledge IAA-CSIC for its ongoing scientific and technical collaboration throughout the development and modernisation of the OP.
