You have found the GitHub Organization for the Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (or OTTER)!
The OTTER web application is available at https://otter.idies.jhu.edu
Each repo is for a different part of the project tentatively structured as follows:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| otter | The Python API for accessing the data in OTTER |
| otterdb | Code for managing the backend "database" of otter |
| otter-docker | Code and instructions to use the otter docker image and work with the otter dataset |
| otter-web | Code for development of the frontend website of otter |
Once you have the Docker container running you will also have started the API server endpoint. This means you can also query OTTER from python! See https://astro-otter.readthedocs.io for detailed instructions. A sample use case to get all of the data for the TDE ASASSN-14li and then access it's coordinates and photometry is below.
# 1) query for the TDE ASASSN-14li
from otter import Otter
db = Otter()
t = db.query(names="ASASSN-14li")[0]
print(t)
# Get and print an astropy skycoord for ASASSN-14li
coord = t.get_skycoord()
print(coord)
# get the photometry
phot = db.get_phot(names="ASASSN-14li")
print(phot)
If you make use of OTTER in your research please cite both our catalog and software papers:
@ARTICLE{Franz2026_OTTER_Catalog,
author = {{Franz}, Noah and {Alexander}, Kate D. and {Gomez}, Sebastian and {Christy}, Collin T. and {Laskar}, Tanmoy and {van Velzen}, Sjoert and {Earl}, Nicholas and {Gezari}, Suvi and {Karmen}, Mitchell and {Margutti}, Raffaella and {Pearson}, Jeniveve and {Villar}, V. Ashley and {Zabludoff}, Ann I.},
title = "{The Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER): Infrastructure Release and Tidal Disruption Event Catalog}",
journal = {\apj},
keywords = {Catalogs, Astronomy databases, Astronomy software, Transient sources, Tidal disruption, 205, 83, 1855, 1851, 1696, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
year = 2026,
month = mar,
volume = {999},
number = {2},
eid = {243},
pages = {243},
doi = {10.3847/1538-4357/ae346e},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
eprint = {2509.05405},
primaryClass = {astro-ph.HE},
adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026ApJ...999..243F},
adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}
@article{Franz2026_OTTER_API,
doi = {10.21105/joss.09516},
url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.09516},
year = {2026},
publisher = {The Open Journal},
volume = {11},
number = {118},
pages = {9516},
author = {Franz, Noah and Alexander, Kate D. and Gomez, Sebastian},
title = {A Python API for OTTER},
journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}
See the detailed developer installation instructions at: https://astro-otter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#developer-installation
