Related papers: The Astropy Problem
Astronomy, as a field, has long encouraged the development of free, open digital infrastructure (e.g., National Research Council 2010, 2011). Examples range from simple scripts that enable individual scientific research, through software…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to…
Understanding astrophysical and cosmological processes can be challenging due to their complexity and lack of intuitive analogies. To address this, we present \texttt{AstronomyCalc}, a Python package specifically designed to aid…
Astronomy has a distinguished tradition of using technology to accelerate the quality and effectiveness of science, and data-intensive initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory lead the way amongst other fields of science. However,…
Progress is being made in code discoverability and preservation, but as discussed at ADASS XXI, many codes still remain hidden from public view. With the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) now indexed by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data…
This paper presents SunPy (version 0.5), a community-developed Python package for solar physics. Python, a free, cross-platform, general-purpose, high-level programming language, has seen widespread adoption among the scientific community,…
The work of astronomers is getting more complex and advanced as the progress of computer development occurs. With improved computing capabilities and increased data flow, more sophisticated software is required in order to interpret, and…
Astronomy is entering in a new era of Extreme Intensive Data Computation and we have identified three major issues the new generation of projects have to face: Resource optimization, Heterogeneous Software Ecosystem and Data Transfer. We…
In science, the lifecycle of software products is typically managed with limited resources while facing unlimited demand. Scientific software requirements are necessarily often dominated by internal project specifications and deadlines, but…
Maximizing the public impact of astronomy projects in the next decade requires NSF-funded centers to support the development of online, mobile-friendly outreach and education activities. EPO teams with astronomy, education, and web…
Astronomy depends on ever increasing computing power. Processor clock-rates have plateaued, and increased performance is now appearing in the form of additional processor cores on a single chip. This poses significant challenges to the…
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and combining archives of data. To address this challenge, we…
We introduce \emph{Astronomy and Computing}, a new journal for the growing population of people working in the domain where astronomy overlaps with computer science and information technology. The journal aims to provide a new communication…
The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been working for a decade to reduce the time and cost of designing, building and deploying new digital radio-astronomy instruments. Today, CASPER…
In the past two years, the environment within which astronomers conduct their data analysis and management has rapidly changed. Working Groups associated with international societies and Big Data projects have emerged to support and…
We report on an informal survey about the use of software in the worldwide astronomical community. The survey was carried out between December 2014 and February 2015, collecting responses from 1142 astronomers, spanning all career levels.…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
SpectraPy is an Astropy affiliated package for spectroscopic data reduction. It collects algorithms and methods for data reduction of astronomical spectra obtained by through-slits spectrographs. It has been created to fill the gap in…
Computational analysis has become ubiquitous within the heliophysics community. However, community standards for peer-review of codes and analysis have lagged behind these developments. This absence has contributed to the reproducibility…