STIPS

The Small Telescope Image Processing Suite, bringing Rubin Observatory's software to 1-meter class telescopes

One-meter class telescopes have decades of images sitting in their archives, but most have no modern software for turning raw frames into science-ready measurements. STIPS, the Small Telescope Image Processing Suite, fills that gap by borrowing the software built for one of the most ambitious telescopes of the decade.

Where the software comes from

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is carrying out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a ten-year survey that photographs the entire southern sky every few nights with an 8.4 m telescope and a 3.2-gigapixel camera. It produces around 20 terabytes of raw images per night and has to flag anything that changes in the sky within about a minute.

Fig 1 (left) The Simonyi Survey Telescope, Rubin Observatory’s primary instrument. Fig 2 (right) LSST planned 10-year sky coverage: total number of visits per area of sky.

To handle that, the Rubin team spent years building the LSST Science Pipelines, a toolkit that covers nearly every step of astronomical image processing. Usefully, it was designed so that it could be adapted to other instruments, not just Rubin’s.

LSST Science Pipelines: Infrastructure for real-time alert processing and long-term data releases.

What STIPS does

Adapting the pipelines to a new telescope normally takes a lot of specialized knowledge. This project started as an attempt to get them running on the Nickel Telescope, a 1 m reflector at Lick Observatory, and grew into a general package that does the hard part once so that other small telescopes can reuse it.

With STIPS, a telescope is described by a short profile: its camera, its filters, and how to read its image headers. From there, a single command-line tool runs the whole process, including:

  • cleaning raw images using calibration frames
  • working out exactly where each image points on the sky and how bright each source is
  • stacking images and subtracting them from one another to find things that have changed
  • building light curves, the record of how an object’s brightness changes over time

STIPS currently supports the Nickel 1 m and the CTIO 1.0 m telescope in Chile, and it runs on a laptop, in a container, or on a computing cluster.

How well it works

We tested STIPS on Nickel data against Landolt standard stars, a set of stars with very well-known brightnesses, and measured them to within 0.05 magnitudes, with positions accurate to better than a pixel. It also reproduced previously published observations of the supernova SN 2020wnt.

I presented STIPS with Kyle Westfall of UC Observatories at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena in June 2026.