Collection of scripts and notebooks for working with SPHEREx data.
Useful materials for the SPHEREx Hack Day at MPIA on November 7, 2025.
Organizers: Iva Momcheva, Eduardo Bañados, Fred Davies
SPEREx Summary:
Key technical specs:
Wavelength range: 0.75–5.0 µm
Spectral resolution: R ≈ 35–130 (depending on wavelength)
Spatial resolution: 6.2″ per pixel
Sky coverage: 100% (four complete all-sky surveys over two years)
SPHEREx will address a broad range of astrophysical questions through its all-sky near-infrared spectral survey. Its main science goals include:
Cosmology: Constraining models of inflation and large-scale structure by measuring the 3D distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies.
Galaxy evolution: Studying the history of star formation and mass assembly across cosmic time using uniform spectral energy distributions.
Interstellar and circumstellar ices: Mapping H₂O, CO₂, CH₃OH, and other molecular features in the Milky Way to understand the chemical pathways leading to planet formation.
About: https://spherex.caltech.edu/
Data: https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/Missions/spherex.html
Document on data processing and format: https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/SPHEREx/docs/SPHEREx_Expsupp_QR.pdf
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02985
Notebooks:
Intro: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/irsa-tutorials/spherex-intro/
Cutouts: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/irsa-tutorials/spherex-cutouts/
PSF: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/irsa-tutorials/spherex-psf/
Eduardo’s tools: https://github.com/banados/spherex-tools
Slides from Fabian: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ywnsylqrj7b27s7wfvm2c/SPHEREx_Overview.YujinYang.pptx?rlkey=brd4os04oql85a7260a2a66ae&dl=0
Hacky way to do photometry?
Show brown dwarf/QSO:
Potential projects:
The previous tool for the cutouts does not give the variance so it had to be calculated from the background. Do the new notebooks above have a way to download the variance?
Is there a better way to do the photometry?
Bridging Euclid + SPHEREX data on scale
Connecting to the LVM data? How do you handle that for extended objects? Mosaic tool that produces images at a single wavelength.
What does HWR want to do with SPHEREX?
Can you do stacks?
LRDs? Select them at low-z? The Egg/the Lord?