About
Fink is a community driven project, open to anyone, that processes time-domains alert streams and connects them with follow-up facilities and science teams. Fink broker has been selected as a community broker to process the full stream of transient alerts from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Since 2020, we are processing the alert stream from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF).
Fink’s processed data stream from ZTF can be accessed through our science portal and our API (with tutorials). This data is aggregated at the end of every observing night by ZTF. For automatic filtered data streams within minutes of observations, please contact us at contact@fink-broker.org An overview of Fink broker architecture and first science results can be found in our white paper published in MNRAS and arxiv.
Fink is currently deployed in Université Paris Saclay thanks to the contribution of IJCLab. For Rubin LSST Fink will be deployed at CC-IN2P3 scientific data centre.
About Fink’s infrastructure
Fink is a broker infrastructure enabling a wide range of applications and services to connect to large streams of alerts issued from telescopes all over the world. Fink core is based on the Apache Spark framework, and more specifically it uses the Structured Streaming processing engine. The language chosen for the API is Python, which is widely used in the astronomy community, has a large scientific ecosystem and easily connects with existing tools.
Fink’s goal is twofold: providing a robust infrastructure and state-of-the-art streaming services to LSST scientists, and enabling user-defined science cases in a big data context. Fink decouples resources needed for listening to the stream (online, critical), and resources used for services: scalable, robust, and modular!
We want Fink to be able to filter, aggregate, enrich, consume incoming data streams or otherwise transform into new streams for further consumption or follow-up processing. Following LSST LDM-612, Fink’s ultimate objectives are (no specific order):
- redistributing alert packets
- filtering alerts
- cross-correlating alerts with other static catalogs or alert stream
- classifying events scientifically
- providing user interfaces to the data
- coordinating scientific activity among collaborators
- triggering followup observing
- for users with appropriate data rights, facilitating followup queries and/or user-generated processing within the corresponding Data Access Center
- managing annotation & citation as followup observations are made
- collecting classification and other information gathered by the scientific community
About Fink’s collaboration
We are eager to have a vibrant collaboration with members from both engineering and research backgrounds around the world. We are commiteed to have an inclusive and respectful collaboration. Our Code of Conduct is available here.
Getting started
If you want to join Fink please check our Joining page, and you will find the documentation website at https://fink-broker.readthedocs.io.