juliensimon/fuse-observations

FUSE Observation Catalog

Credit: NASA/GSFC

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

The FUSE Observation Catalog indexes every observation obtained by NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), which operated from June 24, 1999 to October 18, 2007. FUSE was uniquely designed to observe the hard-to-reach far-UV band between 905 and 1187 Å, where critical absorption lines from H₂, O VI, and deuterium fall — wavelengths inaccessible to Hubble's instruments. Its four coaligned Rowland-circle spectrographs delivered resolving power R ≈ 20,000, the highest ever achieved in space at these wavelengths.

Each row is one FUSE pointing. The archive totals roughly 5,700 observations — modest in count but extraordinarily high-value because of the unique wavelength coverage. FUSE targets include hot white dwarfs (temperature probes via Lyman series), the diffuse interstellar medium (mapping H₂ and O VI in the Milky Way halo), extragalactic quasars (probing the intergalactic medium via absorption), and early-type stars (stellar winds and mass-loss rates).

This dataset is designed for cross-matching with other UV catalogs (IUE, HST, GALEX), identifying FUSE coverage of any sightline of interest, and as a lookup table for retrieving individual spectra from MAST. It complements the HST, IUE, GALEX, JWST, and Chandra observation catalogs in this collection — FUSE fills the 905–1187 Å band that no other mission in that set covers.

The catalog is derived from MAST's CAOM table dbo.caomobservation (collection = 'FUSE'). The archive is static since 2007, so this dataset refreshes quarterly for any late reprocessing or metadata fixes.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
obs_id	string	FUSE observation identifier (11-char alphanumeric, e.g., 'a0010101000'). Primary key.	a0010101000	0.0%
obstype	string	CAOM observation type: 'S' (simple) or 'C' (composite)	S	0.0%
intent	string	Observation intent: 'science' or 'calibration'	science	0.0%
proposal_id	string	FUSE proposal identifier (e.g., 'A001', 'B234'); cycle-letter + sequence	A001	11.7%
proposal_pi	string	Principal Investigator name (free-form)	Werner	11.7%
target_name	string	Target name as provided by the proposer	HE0504-2408	0.0%
target_ra	float64	Target right ascension in decimal degrees (ICRS)	76.57566700000001	0.0%
target_dec	float64	Target declination in decimal degrees (ICRS)	-24.067194	0.0%

Quick stats

• 5,729 FUSE far-UV spectra (1999–2007)
• 2,807 distinct target names
• 238 distinct Principal Investigators
• Unique wavelength coverage: 905–1187 Å (H₂, O VI, deuterium lines)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/fuse-observations", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/fuse-observations", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Top-observed targets
top = df["target_name"].value_counts().head(20)
print(top)

# Sky distribution
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 6))
plt.scatter(df["target_ra"], df["target_dec"], s=1, alpha=0.5)
plt.xlabel("RA (deg)"); plt.ylabel("Dec (deg)")
plt.gca().invert_xaxis()
plt.title("FUSE target pointings (1999–2007)")
plt.show()

Data source

https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/fuse

Update schedule

Quarterly (1st of Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct at 16:00 UTC) via GitHub Actions.

Related datasets

• juliensimon/iue-observations

• juliensimon/hst-observations

• juliensimon/galex-observations

• juliensimon/euve-observations

• juliensimon/quasar-catalog

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{fuse_observations,
  title = {FUSE Observation Catalog},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/fuse-observations},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0