Related papers: The Astropy Problem
One of the most regular activities of amateur clubs is scientific outreach, a paramount channel to disseminate scientific results. It is typically performed through talks given by both experts (professional astronomers) and non-experts to a…
As computer systems become more and more complex, software and tools lag more and more behind. This is especially true for scientific software that often demands high performance, and thus needs to take advantage of parallelisms, memory…
Policy Brief on "Regional and Global Collaborations in Astronomy", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July 2023.…
ASTRA is a Python package that provides a modular, instrument-independent interface for working with high-resolution stellar spectra. Designed to support data from multiple spectrographs, including ESPRESSO (Pepe et al., 2021), HARPS (Mayor…
In the current era of data-intensive science, it is increasingly important for researchers to be able to have access to published results, the supporting data, and the processes used to produce them. Six years ago, recognizing this need,…
We present an algorithm implemented in the astroalign Python module for image registration in astronomy. Our module does not rely on WCS information and instead matches 3-point asterisms (triangles) on the images to find the most accurate…
Broad efforts are underway to capture metadata about research software and retain it across services; notable in this regard is the CodeMeta project. What metadata are important to have about (research) software? What metadata are useful…
Telescopes are much more expensive than astronomers, so it is essential to minimize required sample sizes by using the most data-efficient statistical methods possible. However, the most commonly used model-independent techniques for…
The communities who develop and support open source scientific software packages are crucial to the utility and success of such packages. Moreover, these communities form an important part of the human infrastructure that enables scientific…
In the era of real-time astronomy, citizen scientists play an increasingly important role in the discovery and follow-up of transient astrophysical phenomena. From local astronomical societies to global initiatives, amateur astronomers…
Software is the key crosscutting technology that enables advances in mathematics, computer science, and domain-specific science and engineering to achieve robust simulations and analysis for science, engineering, and other research fields.…
I describe the design, implementation, and usage of galpy, a Python package for galactic-dynamics calculations. At its core, galpy consists of a general framework for representing galactic potentials both in Python and in C (for accelerated…
Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to facilitate access to research objects. Citation principles encourage authors to provide full descriptions of objects, with stable links, in their papers. As Jupyter…
Plyades: A Python Library for Space Mission Design Designing a space mission is a computation-heavy task. Software tools that conduct the necessary numerical simulations and optimizations are therefore indispensable. The usability of…
The Astronomical Genealogy Project (AstroGen) has been underway since January 2013. This project of the Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) has been online since July 2020, courtesy of the AAS. The…
The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex…
This paper summarizes a presentation for a panel discussion on "The Future of Astrostatistics" held at the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy V conference at Pennsylvania State University in June 2011. I argue that the emerging…
We announce the public release of the application program interface (API) for the Open Astronomy Catalogs (OACs), the OACAPI. The OACs serve near-complete collections of supernova, tidal disruption, kilonova, and fast stars data (including…
We describe the application of data mining algorithms to research problems in astronomy. We posit that data mining has always been fundamental to astronomical research, since data mining is the basis of evidence-based discovery, including…
Astronomical phenomena are governed by processes on all spatial and temporal scales, ranging from days to the age of the Universe (13.8,Gyr) as well as from km size up to the size of the Universe. This enormous range in scales is contrived,…