Gaia Sprints

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2026 NYC Gaia DR4 Sprint

Schedule and Location

The 2026 NYC Gaia DR4 Sprint will take place in December 2026 at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), a division of the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation, in New York City. The exact dates will be anchored on the public release of Gaia DR4.

Apply to participate

An application form will be posted here closer to the event.

Objectives

The NYC Gaia DR4 Sprint will be a small in-person event gathering at the CCA in New York City around the release date of Gaia DR4. The idea of the event will be to make preliminary, science-inspired visualizations of the Gaia DR4 data and build new scientific collaborations, locally and globally. Gaia DR4 is the full data release from the nominal Gaia mission, and will include — for the first time — epoch-level astrometry, photometry, and spectroscopy, along with the much-anticipated catalog of non-single stars and exoplanet candidates.

We expect to be over-subscribed; if we are, we will give some preference to early-career applicants, and try to admit a set of participants that span a range of data applications.

Satellite events

We strongly encourage satellite Gaia DR4 Sprints at other institutions around the world, running concurrently with the NYC event. Satellites extend the reach of the Sprint, lower the barrier to participation, and seed new collaborations across time zones. If you are interested in hosting a satellite, please contact the organizers — we would love to help promote your event and coordinate with you.

Organizing Committee

David W Hogg (NYU) (MPIA) (Flatiron)
Jackie Faherty (AMNH)
Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron)
Andy Casey (Flatiron) (Monash)

Collaboration Policy

In addition to a general Code of Conduct, we require participants to agree to a Collaboration Policy that ensures transparency and openness at the Sprints and associated meetings:

All participants at every Gaia Sprint will be expected to openly share their ideas, expertise, code, and interim results. Project development will proceed out in the open, among participants and in the world.

Participants will be encouraged to change gears, start new collaborations, and combine projects. Any participant who contributes significantly to a project can expect co-authorship on resulting scientific papers, and any participant who gets significant contributions to a project is expected to include those contributors as co-authors.

These rules make it inadvisable to bring proprietary data sets or proprietary code to any Sprint, unless the participant bringing such assets has the rights to open them or add collaborators.