Comet

A VOEvent Broker

Comet is a Python implementation of the VOEvent Transport Protocol (VTP).

The core of Comet is a multi-functional VOEvent broker. It is capable of receiving events either by subscribing to one or more remote brokers or by direct connection from authors, and can then both process those events locally and forward them to its own subscribers. In addition, Comet provides a tool for publishing VOEvents to a remote broker. See the website for further details and documentation.

Comet is developed targeting Python 3.6 and later. It depends upon Twisted and lxml.

Major branches in this repository include:

master

Contains the current working version of the code, scheduled to become the next release.

release-X.Y

Branches corresponding to specific Comet releases.

gpg

Work-in-progress test version of Comet incorporating OpenPGP support.

paper

A manuscript describing Comet published Astronomy and Computing.

Comet was originally developed as part of the LOFAR Transients Key Project. It is indexed by the Astrophysics Source Code Library as ascl:1404.008.

If you make use of Comet in published research, please cite Swinbank (2014).

Many thanks to Comet's various contributors!