GCN News and Events

2023

Sep19
New features for September 2023
This September, we've added some new features to GCN Circulars:
- Cross References. Navigate the GCN Circulars archive faster with Circulars cross-references, arXiv preprints, DOIs, and other URLs displayed as hyperlinks.
- Bibliographies. Cite GCN Circulars by retrieving their SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) bibcodes and BibTeX records from the GCN Circulars archive. See the documentation for details.
- Archive Download. Download the entire GCN Circulars archive as a tarball. See the Advanced options section of the GCN Circulars archive.
Aug23
Important notes for GCN Kafka client users
Thanks to the feedback of some of our users, we have tracked down and fixed several reliability issues related to our Kafka brokers and clients. If you are consuming GCN Notices via Kafka in Python, then please take the actions noted below.
- Daily Kafka outages have been resolved. The GCN Kafka brokers had been experiencing daily outages at around 00:00 UTC and lasting from about a minute to an hour. We traced the problem to a log collection agent that was using excessive memory. We resolved the issue by disabling the agent.
- Python sample code has been updated. Our Python client sample code was missing some necessary error handling. Some errors that may occur in the consumer.consume() loop are reported in the returned Kafka message. If you consume GCN Notices via Kafka in Python using the gcn-kafka-python client or confluent-kafka-python, then please be sure to update your code as follows.
  
  If your client consume loop looks like this:
```
while True:
    for message in consumer.consume(timeout=1):
        value = message.value()
        # add your code to process the alert here
```
  then add an if statement to skip normal processing for errors, like this:
```
while True:
    for message in consumer.consume(timeout=1):
        if message.error():
            print(message.error())
            continue
        value = message.value()
        # add your code to process the alert here
```
- New version of Python client. We have released version 0.3.3 of our official Python client, gcn-kafka-python. This version improves the reliability of authentication for long-lived connections. Please update to the latest version. If you are not using our official client but you are using confluent-kafka-python directly, then please update to the latest version of confluent-kafka-python (2.2.0 or newer).
May6
GCN Classic Outage Due to Local Network Maintenance
Due to planned network maintenance at GSFC, the connections to GCN Classic will be offline on Saturday, May 6 from 8AM ET (12:00 UTC) and concluding no later than 3PM ET (19:00 UTC). This affects the following GCN services:
- GCN Classic Notices distribution via socket, VOEvent, and email
- GCN Classic Notices web site archive
- GCN Classic-to-Kafka connection and distribution of Notices via Kafka and email
- Forwarding of GCN Circulars submitted to gcncirc@capella2.gsfc.nasa.gov, however submission to circulars@gcn.nasa.gov and the web form will be unaffected.
Apr6
New GCN Circulars Service Coming April 17, 2023
We are pleased to announce that on April 17, 2023, the General Coordinates Network will launch the most significant overhaul of GCN Circulars since its inception in 1997. The modernized GCN Circulars experience will be part of the new GCN web site. After the transition on April 17, you will be able to:
- Browse and search Circulars in our all-new archive.
- Sign up for and manage your own email subscriptions.
- Enroll yourself and your colleagues to submit Circulars with arXiv-style peer endorsements for new contributors.
- Submit Circulars with our new Web form, or continue to submit by email.
Here is what you need to know about preparing for the transition on April 17.
- If you use Circulars now, we will transfer your settings automatically.
- If you receive Circulars now, you will continue to receive them.
- If you submit Circulars now, you will still be able to submit from the same email addresses.
- Emails from Circulars will come from a new address, no-reply@gcn.nasa.gov.
- We will encourage you to submit Circulars to the new address, circulars@gcn.nasa.gov, but we will still support the old address gcncirc@capella2.gsfc.nasa.gov.
- The new archive will include all past Circulars. We will freeze the old archive, https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3_archive.html.
To introduce GCN users to the new GCN Circular system, we invite you to join one of our three public Zoom webinars:
- April 18, 2023 12:00-13:00 UTC (best for Atlantic): https://bit.ly/3nSOqLN
- April 18, 2023 20:00-21:00 UTC (best for Pacific): https://bit.ly/3mdmAt7
- April 19, 2023 04:00-05:00 UTC (best for Asia and Oceania): https://bit.ly/3UcHogZ

2022

Sep22
New GECAM Notice Types Available
GCN now distributes notices from the GECAM mission. Start streaming GECAM notices using GCN Classic over Kafka, have them delivered to your email inbox using self-service email subscriptions, or receive them as legacy notices using GCN Classic. To modify GCN Classic subscriptions, please contact us.
Sep2
Self-Service Configuration of Email Notifications for GCN Notices
Have GCN Notices delivered to your email inbox by signing up and managing your subscriptions through this web site. To get started, sign in or sign up and then select "Email Notifications" from the account dropdown menu. Note that signing up here does not affect prior subscriptions on the old web site, https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov. To unsubscribe from the old web site, please contact us. See GCN Circular 32517.
Aug1
New GCN Webinars
GCN held three public webinars to introduce the new GCN, the GCN Classic over Kafka service, and plans for new features and feedback. See the slides.
Jul20
GCN Classic over Kafka Now Available
All three classic GCN Notice formats (text, VOEvent, 160-byte binary packet) are now also available over Kafka. This new Kafka streaming service can be used as a drop-in replacement for GCN Classic socket and VOEvent subscribers, with an upcoming release serving email subscribers. See GCN Circular 32419.