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Afterglow

Afterglow Next is a web-first astronomical image-processing application bundled alongside Skynet. It picks up where the in-app data tools stop — anything that needs interactive image inspection, custom photometry, source extraction, plate solving, color composition, or layered editing happens there.

Afterglow is hosted at https://afterglow.skynetgo.org as a separate web application; the source lives in its own sub-monorepo at apps/afterglow/ and has its own docs. From Skynet, observations can be opened directly in Afterglow through the observation detail page; Afterglow can also read observations back through the Skynet API as a logged-in user.

When to use Afterglow vs. the in-app tools

Use the in-app tools (cluster modeling, time-series photometry) when… Use Afterglow when…
You want a quick, parameterized analysis without leaving the network You want full visual control over the image
The workflow fits a standard pipeline The workflow is custom
Results should be persisted alongside the observation You're doing exploratory work first

What Afterglow does

In broad strokes:

  • Image viewing and inspection — stretch, scale, plate solve, blink-compare exposures.
  • Photometry — aperture and PSF photometry with interactive source picking, batch processing across a stack.
  • Source extraction — detect, classify, and catalog sources in one or many images.
  • Astrometric calibration — plate solve against reference catalogs to attach WCS to images that don't have it.
  • Color composition — stack multi-filter exposures into RGB images.
  • Pipelines — chain reduction, calibration, and analysis steps into reusable workflows.

Getting to Afterglow from Skynet

The observation detail page surfaces an "Open in Afterglow" handoff that authenticates against your Skynet identity and opens the observation's files in the Afterglow workspace. Once you're in Afterglow, you can pull additional Skynet data through the same authenticated session.

For Afterglow's own documentation — workflows, plugin model, deployment — see apps/afterglow/CLAUDE.md and the docs site Afterglow publishes.