Science Pipelines documentation

Documentation for the LSST Science Pipelines and related software.

Felis

Felis is a way of describing astronomical database catalogs in a language and DBMS agnostic format. It provides a comprehensive way to describe tabular data, using annotations on tables, columns, and schemas, to document scientifically useful metadata as well as implementation-specific metadata for database management systems, file formats, and application data models.

Source repository
lsst/felis

LSST Science Pipelines

The LSST Science Pipelines are designed to enable optical and near-infrared astronomy in the “big data” era. While they are being developed to process the data for the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (Rubin’s LSST), our command line and programming interfaces can be extended to address any optical or near-infrared dataset.

Source repository
lsst/pipelines_lsst_io

astro_metadata_translator

The astro_metadata_translator package provides generalized infrastructure for handling metadata extraction for astronomical instrumentation.

Source repository
lsst/astro_metadata_translator

cbp

The cbp package provides code for the LSST collimated beam projector (CBP).

Source repository
lsst/cbp

lsst.display.firefly

lsst.display.firefly is a backend for the lsst.afw.display interface, allowing the Firefly visualization framework to be used for displaying data objects from the LSST Science Pipelines.

Source repository
lsst/display_firefly

lsst.images

A Python library providing the data structures used to represent Rubin image data products, bundling image arrays, masks, and variance data with metadata such as point-spread function models.

Source repository
lsst/images

Have feedback?

There are many ways to get in touch:

Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a Federal project jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, with early construction funding received from private donations through the LSST Corporation. The NSF-funded LSST (now Rubin Observatory) Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under the management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). The DOE-funded effort to build the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (LSSTCam) is managed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC).

NSF and DOE will continue to support Rubin Observatory in its operations phase to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. They will also provide support for scientific research with the data. During operations, NSF funding is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF, and DOE funding is managed by SLAC under contract by DOE. Rubin Observatory is operated by NSF's NOIRLab and SLAC.

© 2026 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc.