Welcome to 's documentation!

Website: https://fink-broker.org

Overview

Better than a long speech, here is a list of common questions you might have about Fink!

  • What is Fink?
    • Fink is a broker infrastructure enabling a wide range of applications and services to connect to and scientifically enrich large streams of alerts issued from telescopes all over the world.
  • What are Fink goals?
    • Fink's main scientific objective is to optimize the scientific impact of Rubin alerts for a set of science cases: supernovae, microlensing, multi-messenger astronomy and anomaly detection. On the technological side, Fink aims at providing a robust infrastructure and state-of-the-art streaming services to Rubin scientists, to seamlessly enable user-defined science cases in a big data context.
  • What is the technology behind Fink?
    • Fink core is based on the Apache Spark framework, and more specifically it uses the Structured Streaming processing engine. The language chosen for the API is Python, which is widely used in the astronomy community, has a large scientific ecosystem and easily connects with existing tools.
  • How Fink is different from other brokers?
    • Although Fink has many common features with other brokers, it is community-driven, fully open-source and includes latest big data and machine learning developments.
  • How to join Fink?
    • The collaboration is currently under a more formal construction, and there are rooms for everybody! Contact us at contact(at)fink-broker.org, and we will get in touch with you.
  • Where is the official Fink website?
  • How to access the Science Portal and browse Fink processed data?
  • How to receive Fink alerts live?
    • We have a client (fink-client) that allows you to connect to and receive Fink processed data. How to install it? pip install fink-client! More information, including a tutorial, in the fink-client page.
  • How to contribute to Fink?
    • We welcome scientific and technological contributions as we want Fink to be community-driven. Let's mention also Fink is completely open-source, and we welcome contributors! Make sure you read the guidelines first.

Getting started

Learning Fink is easy whether you are a developer or a scientist: