VAST Extragalactic DR1: light curve database and cutouts

Full description

This collection contains high-level data products for all sources in VAST Extragalactic DR1 (de Ruiter et al. 2026). After applying the filtering criteria described in de Ruiter et al. (2026), the final sample consists of 548,113 astrophysical sources.

These products are designed to allow users to interact with the light curve database, and inspect the radio light curves and cutouts of their sources of interest. A Jupyter notebook demonstrating how to work with the data is available at https://github.com/IrisdeRuiter/VAST_Extragalactic_DR1

The collection includes two main components:
1) A light curve database
2) Cutouts for each source in the database

1. Light curve database
The light curve database is composed of three tables:
- The measurements table contains detailed information about each measurement per source and per timestamp.
- The source table provides per-source statistics calculated across all measurements, including average position, maximum and average integrated/peak flux density, and the variability parameters.
- The image table describes the images and observations that make up VAST Extragalactic DR1.
Appendix 2 in de Ruiter et al. (2026) provides a full description of all table columns. The light curve database tables are presented as csv and parquet files which can be read by data exploration libraries such as Pandas and vaex.

2. Cutouts
Image cutouts are essential for assessing the quality and reliability of the light curves. They allow users to identify issues such as spurious detections, high local noise, or artefacts near bright sources.
Each source has an associated FITS cube containing cutouts for all individual detections. These cubes are named using the unique source identifier from the light curve database.

Caveats
We encourage the community to make use of the light curves in this release, but users should keep the following caveats in mind (see sections 4.3 and 4.4 in de Ruiter et al. 2026 for full details):
- Despite careful filtering efforts, this data release will contain spurious sources and measurements. We encourage users to inspect the image cutouts for their sources, to ensure that the light curves only include reliable flux density measurements.
- This data release does not contain light curves for all sources in the VAST Extragalactic survey footprint. For example, sources that are too bright, too faint or extended are not included; see detailed filters in de Ruiter et al (2026).

Lineage: The full description of these data and their processing is available in de Ruiter et al. (2026).
The light curve database is adapted from the VAST pipeline output. The cutouts are made from the post-processed images using the astropy.nddata.utils. Cutout2D function, and compressing each image hdu with astropy.io.fits.CompImageHDU function.