Our Notebook Philosophy

STScI's mission is to make cutting-edge astronomy accessible to everyone. Creating open-source Jupyter Notebooks and making them available on GitHub maximizes accessibility and community engagement.

Why Jupyter Notebooks?

Jupyter Notebooks are, for the time being, one of the best resources for sharing narrated code. They allow us to:

• Present science cases and workflows that are useful to the community. Example use-cases include foundational procedures (e.g., how to perform background subtraction) and scientific procedures focused on specific observing modes (e.g., spectral extraction and analysis with NIRSpec MOS).
• Demonstrate existing functionality of core astronomy libraries and visualization tools. We highlight software developed by STScI (like astroquery.mast) and externally maintained packages (like lightkurve). This is helpful to beginners and experts alike as a compendium of tools for analysis.
• Gauge the need for additonal functionality and features that would be useful to the community. Since these notebooks are actively maintained and monitored, they're an excellent way for users to report stumbling blocks or necessary improvements.

Why Python?

Since most astronomers are already familiar with Python, that is the default language in our repository. Additionally, as Python is relatively easy to learn and use, our content remains accessible to students, amateur astronomers, and other non-experts.