About this Article

Published December 5, 2025 

Jupyter Notebooks are now a standard tool in the astronomical sciences for combining code, documentation, visualizations, and data access into a unified and interactive format. The growth of open-source libraries such as Astropy now provides many useful analysis tools, accelerating the adoption of notebooks that foster open collaboration in software development.

To support the community, STScI has developed numerous user tutorials in the form of notebooks for HST, JWST, MAST, and soon Roman that demonstrate common workflows for users of all experience levels.

Recently, a cross-divisional team completed major upgrades to improve the functionality of the HST Notebooks repository, which contains Jupyter Notebook tutorials for core workflows for each HST instrument, as well as the DrizzlePac software suite. This included a consolidation of notebooks into a single repository with automated weekly checks to ensure all notebooks function properly with the latest software packages, combined with rendered HTML webpages that present the results and visualizations for each notebook without requiring them to be executed by the user.

This effort is marked by an official v1.1.0 repository release available on GitHub and Zenodo that enables users to access high-quality tutorials and cite the use of these notebooks in journal publications. Each new release of the repository will be accompanied by a DOI that can be added to AAS journal style publications using the \doi{} command within your main LaTeX file.

We encourage users to take advantage of these notebooks in their scientific analyses and cite them in their publications. The notebooks for each mission may be run locally on standard laptop computers. The Roman repository is primarily designed for the Roman Research Nexus (RRN or Nexus), which is Roman’s science cloud platform that will be publicly released this month.

Questions and comments regarding the notebooks for each telescope may be submitted to their respective instrument teams through the Help Desk portal for each mission supported by STScI, including HST, JWST, Roman, and MAST.