NOAO Data Lab Public release

Knut Olsen, Data Lab Project Scientist

Screenshot of the new NOAO Data Lab home page available on June 5

The NOAO Data Lab will be opened to users on June 5, 2017! Created to foster community use of the high-value survey datasets now being collected with NOAO and other facilities, the Data Lab provides the infrastructure that enables efficient exploration and analysis of large datasets. With the Data Lab you can:

• Create a user account that gives you access to software services, remote analysis, and storage space,
• Access web-based exploration and catalog query tools,
• Query databases containing ~1 billion objects from DECaLS DR3, SMASH DR1, and other surveys,
• Create image cutouts from any public image in the NOAO Archive,
• Store your search results in personal database storage or on a remote virtual disk, and
• Perform exploration and analysis through a Jupyter notebook server.

In the coming months, the Data Lab will provide access to the first catalog Data Release of the Dark Energy Survey (DES DR1), additional DECaLS catalog releases (DR4 and DR5), and the (nearly) all-sky NOAO Source Catalog.

Visit https://datalab.noirlab.edu/ for more information and, after June 5, create a user account to get started!

NOAO Data Lab at the Austin AAS Meeting. Coincident with the public release, the NOAO Data Lab team will be conducting live demos at the June AAS meeting. Visit the NOAO booth to:

• Learn to explore, query, and analyze catalogs such as DECaLS DR3 and SMASH DR1,
• See science examples that use the Data Lab (e.g., star, galaxy, and QSO identification with data from the DECaLS and SDSS surveys, and the discovery of a faint dwarf galaxy in SMASH survey data), or
• Work on a hack project with one of our Data Lab team members!

Also at the AAS meeting, NOAO Data Scientist David Nidever will introduce the all-sky NOAO Source Catalog in his Session 216 poster.