Data Access
DP0.2 now served from USDF at SLAC
Starting today, DP0.2 images are being served from their new location US Data Facility at SLAC (instead of Google Cloud).
This change is transparent to data.lsst.cloud users, however, there is a significantly higher latency in image access as a result compared to what we expected from testing, which we are working to understand and improve.
Notebook
New Recommended image (based on Weekly 2025_09).
There is a new Recommended image, based on the LSST Science Pipelines 2025 week 9 build. This build is also a release candidate for the next official LSST Science Pipelines version.
If you already have a notebook session, exit it and start a new one to select the new Recommended.
Unless you have strong reasons to do otherwise, you should use the Recommended image which is selected for the best balance between new features and robustness.
Python bumped up to 3.12 in Recommended
This is the first Recommended image to reflect the LSST Science Pipeline upgrade to Python 3.12 (currently 3.12.9).
If you have installed your own Python packages in your Notebook environment for the previous version of Python (3.11) you might need to re-install them.
New way of accessing tutorial notebooks in Recommended.
Starting from the new Recommended (Weekly 2025_09) there is an improved way to access tutorial notebooks. Tutorial notebooks are now available from the JupyterLab menu:
When you select a notebook from the menu, it will appear on the filesystem under $HOME/notebooks/tutorials/. You can modify the notebook in place if you like. If you would like to go back to the original version of the notebook (before your modifications), close the notebook tab and ask for it from the menu again - you will be asked whether to overwrite your changed version.
You will also note that there is now an additional structure under the Tutorials menu, reflecting which Data Release they apply to.
If you are an existing user, go ahead and remove the previous copy of the tutorial notebooks from your directory - this will save space and avoid confusion:
chmod -R u+w $HOME/notebooks/tutorial-notebooks/
rm -rf $HOME/notebooks/tutorial-notebooks/
If you need a git checkout of the tutorial notebook repository to contribute improvements, note its new home: GitHub - lsst/tutorial-notebooks: Tutorial Jupyter Notebooks maintained by the Rubin Observatory Community Science Team.
Expand this if you are interested in the reasons for this change
Previously, we put in a copy of the entire tutorial notebook repository in your home space. Since the system did this for you, there was no obvious way to easily recover if you wanted to go back to the latest “factory” version and so this directory was write-protected to avoid users modifying it permanently by mistake, which in turn meant that if you actually wanted to work starting from a tutorial notebook you had to take your own copy.
The new method requires fewer steps to start working, is less confusing to new users, and avoids unnecessary use of disk space from users who are only interested in one or two tutorials. It also will improve user experience as the number of data releases increases, allowing you to select the appropriate version of a tutorial for a given release.
New home for RSP / data.lsst.cloud announcements
News and updates for services and data accessible at data.lsst.cloud is now posted in the Data Services news category.
If you would like to be notified of new announcements, you can go to your forum’s settings, select Categories → Watching First Post, and search for “Data Services.”
