News from Astro Data Lab

Exciting developments have taken place at the Astro Data Lab science platform over the last few months.

New spectroscopic capabilities. We have begun serving SDSS DR16 spectra and will add additional datasets going forward, including spectra from the DESI Survey. The Data Lab team has deployed a performant and easy to use service that allows users to query for any number of spectra simultaneously. Figure 1 shows an example use case for the new service. We invite you to try it out!

Become a beta tester. If you have interest and/or some experience with SDSS spectra, please contact us at datalab@noao.edu to become a beta tester of this new spectral access service. We will set you up with example Jupyter notebooks which you can run at Astro Data Lab. They demonstrate how to access and visualize the spectra, perform analyses, etc. We are eager to learn how our users envision exploring spectroscopic datasets including both simple and ambitious applications, and to hear your honest impression of the new service. Thank you!

JupyterLab interface available. We also have exciting news for users of Astro Data Lab’s Jupyter Notebook Server: the modern JupyterLab interface will be the new default from 26 October. JupyterLab offers great usability enhancements over the “classic” notebook interface, which remains available at Astro Data Lab. The enhancements include the ability to split the view into separate sub-windows all connected to the same kernel, an integrated file browser, a built-in interactive Python console with command history, and many other features. A complete documentation of JupyterLab, with easy introduction chapters, can be found here: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/

End of life for Python-2. Python-3 is now mature, fast, and the default Python version for the foreseeable future. While all current notebooks curated by Astro Data Lab use Python-3, some users may still work with older Python-2 versions. Our updated User Manual provides guidance for updating these older notebooks, and we are happy to assist users individually if needed. The User Manual also explains some of the differences between the JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook interfaces.

New datasets have arrived at Astro Data Lab in recent months:

• GOGREEN+GCLASS DR1: the result of a NOIRLab-wide collaboration between the GOGREEN team, Gemini Observatory, and the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) to host survey data products from Gemini Large and Long Programs. Further details are provided in a separate article in this edition of Currents.
• Legacy Surveys DR8
• Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH) DR2
• DECam Plane Survey (DECaPS) measurements catalog (for time-domain aficionados)
• Several SDSS releases, including the SDSS DR16 spectroscopic catalog (with the “Firefly” catalog), the SDSS DR12 spectroscopic catalog including the “Portsmouth galaxy Emission Line measurements”, the SDSS DR14 photometric data set, and all file-based SDSS data from DR8 through DR16 (SDSS-III and SDSS-IV)
• Hipparcos-2 and Tycho catalogs.

Currently we are preparing for the arrival of two very large datasets:

• Legacy Surveys DR9
• Dark Energy Survey (DES) DR2 (ETA January 2021).

Join us at the January AAS Meeting. We invite you to join Astro Data Lab at the 237th AAS Meeting (virtual). In a 90-minute Special Session “The Data Lab Science Platform and Open-Data Ecosystem at NSF’s NOIRLab,” to be held on 12 January 2021 at 4:10pm EST, we will hear talks from Data Lab users and CSDC teams that showcase how unified access to datasets, co-location with powerful data services, and integration within NOIRLab all enable previously impossible scientific research and astronomy education opportunities. An associated Poster Session invites contributions from the community, and a related Splinter Session “NOIRLab’s Data Services: A Practical Demo Built on Science with DES DR2” will feature demos and hands-on tutorials. The 90-minute Splinter Session is scheduled for 14 January 2021 at 4:10pm EST.