Tutorial 4

Instructor: Ivelina Momcheva (STScI)
Title: Working with the Hubble Space Telescope Public Data on Amazon Web Services
Time: TBD
Instructions:
Participants must create an account on AWS prior to the workshop here: https://aws.amazon.com/console/ Make sure you have the following for the tutorial:

Laptop
Internet browser
Text editor (such as vim, emacs; NOT a text processor such as Word)
Terminal (OSX and Linux have defaults, Windows users recommendation: http://faculty.smu.edu/reynolds/unixtut/windows.html
Access to the internet (hotel has good 5Mbit WiFi per person)

Abstract: In May 2018 STScI announced that ~110TB of Hubble’s archival observations are available in cloud storage on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This tutorial will provide an introduction to accessing this dataset and to the AWS cloud computing in general for members of the astronomical community who have not previously used cloud resources. We will demonstrate how to access the Hubble Public Dataset on AWS in order to carry out a variety of tasks. Participants will be introduced to the custom MAST extension of the astroquery Python library (astroquery.mast) and the AWS client Python library boto3. We will demonstrate operations with the data such as retrieving, displaying and running analysis on single images. We will then show participants how to scale up their analysis through serverless computing. Finally we will showcase some advanced capabilities such as logging, price estimation. etc.
Level: The tutorial will be geared toward novice AWS users.
Prerequisites: Intermediate Python knowledge is strongly recommended.
Notice: Free AWS credits will be provided but participants will need a valid credit card in order to create an AWS account even though no charges will be incurred during the tutorial.