About Constellation#

Constellation is an autonomous control and data acquisition system for small-scale experiments and experimental setup with volatile and dynamic constituents such as testbeam environments or laboratory test stands. Constellation aims to provide a flexible framework that is easy to use and requires minimal effort for the integration of new devices.

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Constellation is hosted at and mainly developed by Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, a Research Center of the Helmholtz Association.

A list of all authors and contributors can be found in the AUTHORS.md file in the software repository.

The development of Constellation is coordinated through the EDDA (Exchange on & Development of Data Acquisitions) Collaboration. Events, workshops and new releases are announced via the EDDA mailing list.

Software License#

The software is released as open source software under the terms of the European Union Public License 1.2. The authors wish to emphasize the interoperability of the license, and hereby declare their intention to choose this license so that:

  • all modifications and extensions of the Constellation framework must be made available under the same or a compatible license, such as the LGPL.

  • software that links parts of the Constellation framework or the Constellation libraries, or connects to components of the Constellation framework via a network, can be implemented under any license, including proprietary licenses.

More information in the intent of the European Union Public License can be found on the website of the European Commission.

This website and the documentation are distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license.

Citing Constellation#

Constellation is distributed freely and openly under the EUPL license, but the authors kindly ask to cite the reference paper and the Zenodo record in scientific publications:

  • The reference paper is published in NIM A and can be found at 10.1016/j.nima.2026.171279. Please cite this paper for all works using Constellation, for example as:

    S. Spannagel et al., “Constellation: The autonomous control and data acquisition system for dynamic experimental setups”, Nucl. Instr. Meth. A 1085 (2026) 171279, doi:10.1016/j.nima.2026.171279, arXiv:2601.06494.

  • The versioned Zenodo records can be found at 10.5281/zenodo.15688357. Please cite the version used for the published work. For example, the version 0.6.1 should be cited as:

    S. Lachnit, H. Perrey & S. Spannagel (2025). Constellation (0.6.1). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17294234.

BibTex Citations
@article{constellation,
  title = {Constellation: The autonomous control and data acquisition system for dynamic experimental setups},
  journal = {Nucl. Instr. Meth. A},
  volume = {1085},
  pages = {171279},
  year = {2026},
  issn = {0168-9002},
  doi = {10.1016/j.nima.2026.171279},
  author = {Simon Spannagel and Stephan Lachnit and Hanno Perrey and Justus Braach and Lene Kristian Bryngemark and Erika Garutti and Adrian Herkert and Finn King and Christoph Krieger and David Leppla-Weber and Linus Ros and Sara {Ruiz Daza} and Murtaza Safdari and Luis G. Sarmiento and Annika Vauth and Håkan Wennlöf},
  eprint={2601.06494},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={physics.ins-det},
}

@software{lachnit_2025_17294234,
  author       = {Stephan Lachnit and Hanno Perrey and Simon Spannagel},
  title        = {Constellation},
  year         = 2025,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {0.6.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.17294234},
}