There are two hands-on sessions during the 2026 Sagan Summer Workshop. We encourage all attendees to participate in these sessions as much as possible, as well as in the group projects that have informal presentations on Friday afternoon. Both in-person and remote attendees can participate; however, support for remote attendees may be somewhat limited.
The hands-on session activities will use Google Colaboratory (Colab) Notebooks which is a browser based Python platform. As the Colab Notebooks run in your Google Drive using a virtual machine, and do not require a Python installation, they are the easiest way to work on the hands-on sessions. No prior Python experience is required to participate in the hands-on sessions, but a free Google account is required to run the Colab Notebooks. For experienced Python users, the Colab Notebooks can generally be downloaded and run as Jupyter Notebooks, but there may be dependencies that need to be installed in addition to the defined packages.
Each hands-on session has a Setup notebook that must be run one time only prior to running the exercise notebooks. The Setup notebooks create directories in your Google drive and download the necessary files. The Setup notebooks can be run ahead of time or at the beginning of the hands-on session as they do not take long to run.
If you are new to Python, Tim Brandt (STScI) has contributed an Introduction to Python programming document that will be useful information for the hands-on sessions, especially for those working on them independently.
The Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey is going to detect over a thousand exoplanets via gravitational microlensing. In this hands-on session, participants will learn the basics of modelling microlensing events and extracting microlensing parameters from light curves. Participants will be introduced to standard modelling practices in the field, and we will briefly discuss existing tools and software for microlensing modelling.
Some of the learning objectives for this hands-on session are:
In order to fully characterize an exoplanet, you need to characterize its host star. Participants will explore an example host star in a Galactic context using simulated end-of-season Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey star catalogs. They will explore how we can use color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), isochrones, extinction maps, spectral energy distributions (SEDs), proper motions, and parallaxes to understand a star and its surrounding population.
Learning objectives include:
Questions? Sagan_Workshop@ipac.caltech.edu
(last updated March 11th, 2026 14:25:07)
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.
