Together we discover

VNA · REPERIMVS

R.A.V.E.N. (Rare Astronomical-object Variability Exploration Network) Institute is a nonprofit research institute in time-domain astronomy. Its purpose is to give anyone a pathway into astronomical research, regardless of institutional affiliation, academic standing or age. The first pathways are for teams of a student and a parent; they then open to members of the general public.

Astronomy has long been practised in families. Maria Mitchell learned to observe from her father, William, on the roof of the Pacific Bank in Nantucket, and found the comet C/1847 T1 there in 1847. William Cranch Bond and his son George discovered Saturn's moon Hyperion in 1848 (Bond 1848) and directed the Harvard College Observatory in succession. Maria Margaretha Kirch, who found the comet C/1702 H1, trained her son and two daughters as her assistants. In 2011 Kathryn Gray, aged ten, found the supernova SN 2010lt with her father, Paul Gray, and David Lane (CBET 2618). The Institute's student–parent teams continue this practice in the survey archives.

Survey facilities now deliver public data faster than the professional community can examine them. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope returns 1.4 TB per day with no proprietary period, more in its first year than the Hubble archive holds after 35 years (STScI 2026); the Vera C. Rubin Observatory issues up to seven million alerts per night (Ivezić et al. 2019). The Institute terms this condition hyper-scale data astronomy: the limiting resource is no longer storage or computation but human examination. Automated classifiers make the first pass; the objects that remain, their follow-up and their interpretation require people.

Using analysis tools developed for this purpose, the Institute gives each team research-grade access to these archives, among them Roman, PLATO, SPHEREx, TESS, WISE and Gaia. The Institute lists the projects it conducts; each team enrols in a project and works toward individual or team research goals, from a defined question through analysis to submission in the peer-reviewed literature under their own names. Mentorship is free of cost and held on Zoom, where each group meets with a mentoring astronomer once a week. The research concerns rare variable objects, among them eclipsing binaries and M dwarfs, whose variability constrains their masses, radii and evolution.

R.A.V.E.N. Institute was founded by Rajiv Uttamchandani, Visiting Astronomer at Caltech and previously Visiting Professor of Physics at Loyola Marymount University. The data shown are public: images from SPHEREx, JWST, Hubble, the Rubin Observatory, VISTA, DECam, SDO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Apollo and the Mars rovers; spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility and NEOWISE. Twelve are shown in sequence, then 2,500 in one panel.

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