Tails identifies and localizes comets in image data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic optical sky survey, using deep-learning with a custom EfficientDet-based architecture. It detects comets in single images in near real time, rather than requiring multiple epochs as in traditional methods. In production, Tails achieves 99% recall, a false positive rate below 0.01%, and 1–2 pixel root mean square error in the predicted position.

ZChecker finds, measures, and visualizes known comets in the Zwicky Transient Facility time-domain survey. Images of targets are identified using on-line ephemeris generation and survey metadata. The photometry of the targets are measured and the images are processed with temporal filtering to highlight morphological variations in time.

The catsHTM package quickly accesses and cross-matches large astronomical catalogs that have been reformatted into the HDF5-based file format. It performs efficient cone searches at resolutions from a few arc-seconds to degrees within a few milliseconds time, cross-match numerous catalogs, and can do general searches.