Shared Data

Astronomy benefits from a culture of sharing data, and many discoveries are made using publicly accessible data archives. We will be building our own community archive during this class in the form of a shared Google Drive folder. We recommend making a shortcut to this folder in your own Google Drive, ideally directly in My Drive rather than a subfolder, so that the data can be easily accessed from Google Colab with the same path for everyone.

The shared Google Drive folder is here.

Managing files can quickly become very tedious in this class, especially when sharing data between groups, so we will follow a standard structure for the shared folder. Science exposures will be placed in data/<object_name>/<observation_date>/<telescope>/ with filter and exposure time information in the file name. Calibration files will be placed in data/calibration/<observation_date>/<telescope>/ with prefixes flat_, dark_, and bias_. Files from a night of observing M51 last year are already there as an example, please take a quick look. (Note: we cheated and pulled darks from a nearby night… don’t do this!) We provide a nice way to load and process files from this structure using Python dictionaries in Lab 0.2. It pays to be organized here!