Data and Design: Jupyter Notebook Tutorials for STScI

The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is an important tool for professional and student astronomers conducting research. A key part of this archive is its capacity to host publicly accessible data products from all Space Telescope Science Institute missions. In order to help maximize the ease of use of these data products, STScI has started to build a repository of Jupyter Notebook tutorials that demonstrate methods of accessing, reducing, and analyzing data. These first Notebooks define a structure for more tutorials to follow, eventually building a large collection as a readily available, educational resource. These tutorials use Kepler data products and future Notebooks will make use of data from a large range of STScI missions. The goal of all the tutorials is to demonstrate how to download, read, and plot data in different ways so the user may become familiar with methods to analyze data and use it in research or projects beyond the tutorials. The intended audience for these Notebooks are undergraduate students who are studying astronomy or working professionals who may not be familiar with how to use these specific data products. Data to run the tutorials is obtained in each Notebook through Astroquery code walk-throughs, so the user does not need to download data beforehand. Ultimately, the Notebooks will be able to run on an online server, thereby omitting the need for users to obtain software packages and allowing all parts of the tutorial to be operated through an internet browser. These tutorials have the potential to become tools that create a greater accessibility around data usage for students or other users who do not have access to substantial resources already.