tom-transients-fyi

A TOM Toolkit data service for transients.fyi: bring a view's objects into your TOM as targets, with their light curves, non-detections included.

• Targets from a view. Paste the API URL from the Subscribe panel of a transients.fyi objects view (https://transients.fyi/api/objects?…) or a /tonight.json?… URL, or fill in a few fields (window, source, TNS type, discovered within, brightness, a declination band, AAVSO campaigns). Each object becomes a SIDEREAL target named by its TNS name (else its designation or id), with its other names as aliases and its class, redshift, discovery night and link as extras.
• Photometry. Reported objects' detections and 5σ limits from transients.fyi (TNS, CBAT, ASAS-SN, ATLAS and AAVSO reports; magnitudes AB, Vega ones converted). ZTF and Rubin objects' alerts from the Fink broker: ZTF's upper limits, and Rubin's forced photometry on visits without a detection as 5σ limits (Rubin's times are TAI, converted to UTC); with the reported points of the designations they carry (an object's TNS name: TNS's, ATLAS's and AAVSO's points, the designation in the source name).
• Update Reduced Data on a target page fetches its photometry again (from its tfyi_id extra). A report that a ZTF or Rubin object takes over follows it: transients.fyi redirects the report's id to that object, and the target's tfyi_id moves there.

Requires TOM Toolkit 3 (tom_dataservices). Tested with tomtoolkit 3.0.1.

Installation

pip install tom-transients-fyi

Add the app to INSTALLED_APPS in your TOM's settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'tom_dataservices',
    'tom_transients_fyi',
]

The service appears under Data Services as transients.fyi. No key is needed. To point it at another copy of the site:

DATA_SERVICES = {
    "transients.fyi": {"base_url": "https://transients.fyi"},
}

Credits

Please credit transients.fyi and the providers of the data you use, as transients.fyi/data lists them: Fink (Möller et al. 2021), ZTF (Bellm et al. 2019), the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Ivezić et al. 2019), the TNS, CBAT, ATLAS (Tonry et al. 2018; Smith et al. 2020; Shingles et al. 2021) and AAVSO.

Development

With uv:

uv sync                                                           # .venv with the locked versions
uv run python tom_transients_fyi/tests/run_tests.py               # tests on recorded responses
uv run python tom_transients_fyi/tests/run_tests.py --canary      # against the live services
uv run python tom_transients_fyi/tests/check_migrations.py
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check .

The tests run on responses recorded from transients.fyi and Fink on 2026-09-30 (tom_transients_fyi/tests/data). CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs the same on Python 3.10–3.13, Linux and macOS; the canary runs daily.

Releasing

The version comes from the git tag (hatch-vcs). Tag and push:

git tag v0.1.0 && git push origin v0.1.0

.github/workflows/release.yml runs CI, builds with uv build, publishes to PyPI by trusted publishing (no token) and makes a GitHub release with the files.