About
Breathing Comets is a public tool to see how the infrared sky changes, built with real SPHEREx images, for NASA Space Apps 2026.
What it is
SPHEREx maps the whole sky in 102 colors of infrared light, every six months. Breathing Comets turns that archive into a time machine: type any coordinates and watch the same patch of sky across dates, see what moved, read a spectrum from any pixel, and follow the gas that comets release.
Everything shown is a real SPHEREx frame or a measurement made from one, with its uncertainty and its caveats. Where something is not available or not verified, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
The challenge
Planet X and SPHEREx, an advanced challenge of the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026. The brief asks for a public web tool that displays SPHEREx images and makes it easy for anyone to see how they change over time. Pluto was found by comparing two images of the same sky; the same idea, applied to infrared images, is the starting point here.
Team: Breathing Comets.
Where to start
Data and credits
This project is independent. It is not a NASA product and uses no NASA logos. All data are public and belong to their providers.
| Source | Provider | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| SPHEREx level-2 images (DR1, QR3) | NASA/JPL-Caltech/IRSA | All images, spectra and measurements |
| SPHEREx all-sky cube (HiPS, DR1) | IRSA (NASA/IPAC) | Reference sky in Lab mode |
| Gaia DR3 | ESA/Gaia/DPAC | Star positions, proper motions and parallaxes |
| 2MASS, AllWISE and NEOWISE | IRSA (NASA/IPAC). 2MASS: UMass and IPAC/Caltech. WISE, NEOWISE: NASA/JPL-Caltech | Photometry checks and asteroid size validation |
| Horizons, Small-Body Database and SB Identification | NASA/JPL | Ephemerides and identification of moving objects |
| SIMBAD | CDS, Strasbourg (Harvard mirror) | Name resolution and star catalogue positions |
| Aladin Lite | CDS, Strasbourg | Sky viewer in Lab mode (Boch & Fernique 2014; Baumann et al. 2022) |
| Astropy and reproject | Astropy Project | Coordinates, WCS and image reprojection (Astropy Collaboration 2022) |
Use of AI
We used Claude Code (Anthropic) as an assistant for research, code and writing. Its results were checked against independent data, such as 2MASS and WISE photometry, published comet values and NEOWISE sizes, and an audit corrected several figures before publication. The checks and what remains unverified are listed in the method page.
No image on this site is generated by AI: every picture is a real SPHEREx frame or a plot of measured data.
Software and fonts
Newsreader, IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono are distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Aladin Lite is distributed under GPL-3. The source code of this site is public on GitHub.