| url: | http://gaia.lol |
|---|---|
| hashtag: | #GaiaSprint |
A project to support exploration and scientific use of the Gaia Data Releases. The current release is Data Release 3.
2022 NYC Gaia DR3 Fête
2020 EDR3 Unboxing Gaia Sprint
2019 Santa Barbara Gaia Sprint
2019 Gaia Sprint: Oxford Satellite
2019 Gaia Sprint: Seattle Satellite
2018 NYC Gaia Sprint
2018 Gaia Sprint: Seattle Satellite
2018 Gaia Sprint: Santa Barbara Satellite
2018 DR2 Zero-Day Workshop
2017 Heidelberg Gaia Sprint
2016 NYC Gaia Sprint
The 2026 Gaia Relay is a sequence of three Gaia DR4 Sprint events held in three consecutive weeks, in three cities, passing the baton westward around the world following the release of Gaia DR4. The 2026 Gaia Relay is an experiment on how we organize conferences. It is one event, with three legs: participants, projects, and interim results will all be different in the different legs, but we hope that ideas and collaborations will extend from one leg to the next.
Each of the Relay events will be small in-person gatherings around the release date of Gaia DR4. The idea 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 5-year 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.
One Organizing Committee runs the whole Relay; it includes the local coordinators for each leg.
You can apply for the 2026 Gaia Relay.
There is a single, common application for the Relay: you apply once, indicating which leg (or legs) you would like to attend. However, given the limited capacity at each event and historical oversubscription rates at the Gaia Sprints, we expect that most applicants will only attend one leg. We will try to admit a set of participants that span a range of skills, interests, and career stages, within the capacity limits for each location.
| Dates | Venue | |
|---|---|---|
| Leg 1: New York City | 2026 December 1–4 | CCA, Flatiron Institute |
| Leg 2: Santa Barbara | 2026 December 7–11 | KITP, UC Santa Barbara |
| Leg 3: Melbourne | 2026 December 14–18 | Monash University |
The Relay opens December 1–4 at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation, in New York City, USA.
Local coordinators: Megan Bedell, Andy Casey, David W Hogg, Jackie Faherty, and Adrian Price-Whelan
The Relay continues December 7–11 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Local coordinators: Kareem El Badry, Casey Lam, Adrian Price-Whelan, and Dominick Rowan
The Relay concludes December 14–18 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Local coordinators: Andy Casey, Thavisha Dharmawardena, and Melissa Ness
We strongly encourage satellite Gaia DR4 Sprints at other institutions around the world, running concurrently with any leg of the Relay. Satellites extend the reach of the Relay, 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.
The Collaboration Policy is common to all three legs of the Relay. 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.
This page is maintained by davidwhogg, adrn, and andycasey as part of the project davidwhogg/GaiaSprint. The valid HTML and valid CSS are modified versions of orderedlist.