Jupyter Notebook Walkthroughs For Working With The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is a powerful tool for ultraviolet astronomy onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) whose capacity for scientific accomplishment flourishes when as many people as possible can access and perform useful science with COS data. To promote access to this complex data, the COS team has developed a growing suite of walkthrough tutorials in the form of Jupyter Notebooks. These tutorials interactively guide a COS user through every step of working with data from the instrument. Currently, there are eight finished tutorials – such as downloading a raw or processed COS spectrum, plotting COS data, reprocessing raw data through the CalCOS pipeline, and convolving a spectrum with the instrument’s line spread functions. The notebooks have been written to be independent and modular in order to build off of one another without repetition. They are intended for a diverse set of users – from astronomy experts unfamiliar with Python, to undergraduates getting their first glimpse at astronomical data, to the fascinated member of the general public. These notebooks are hosted in a public-facing STScI GitHub repository which will continue to grow as more tutorials are built.