Related papers: Ten (or more!) reasons to register your software w…
The next-generation astronomy archives will cover most of the universe at fine resolution in many wavelengths. One of the first of these projects, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will create a 5-wavelength catalog over 10,000 square…
We develop a new model for automatic extraction of reported measurement values from the astrophysical literature, utilising modern Natural Language Processing techniques. We use this model to extract measurements present in the abstracts of…
Background: Assessing and communicating software engineering research can be challenging. Design science is recognized as an appropriate research paradigm for applied research but is seldom referred to in software engineering. Applying the…
Making online resources more accessible to physically challenged library users is a topic deserving informed attention from astronomy librarians. Recommendations like WCAG 2.0 standards and section 508, in the United States, have proven…
Developers often leave behind clues in their code, admitting where it falls short, known as Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). In the world of Scientific Software (SSW), where innovation moves fast and collaboration is key, such debt is…
Over the past few years, the role of visualization for scientific purpose has grown up enormously. Astronomy makes an extended use of visualization techniques to analyze data, and scientific visualization has became a fundamental part of…
Research software is crucial in the research process and the growth of Open Science underscores the importance of accessing research artifacts, like data and code, raising traceability challenges among outputs. While it is a clear principle…
The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been…
The SunPy Project developed a 13-question survey to understand the software and hardware usage of the solar physics community. 364 members of the solar physics community, across 35 countries, responded to our survey. We found that…
Wavelength calibration is a routine and critical part of any spectral work-flow, but many astronomers still resort to matching detected peaks and emission lines by hand. We present RASCAL (RANSAC Assisted Spectral CALibration), a python…
The Astronomy Genealogy Project ("AstroGen"), a project of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), will soon appear on the AAS website. Ultimately, it will list the world's astronomers with their…
Improved software discovery is a prerequisite for greater software reuse: after all, if someone cannot find software for a particular task, they cannot reuse it. Understanding people's approaches and preferences when they look for software…
Open source software (OSS) is essential for modern society and, while substantial research has been done on individual (typically central) projects, only a limited understanding of the periphery of the entire OSS ecosystem exists. For…
Siril is a powerful open-source software package designed for the preprocessing and post-processing of astronomical images. It is particularly well-suited for astrophotography enthusiasts and professional astronomers alike. Siril provides…
The Einstein On-Line Service (EOLS) is a simple menu-driven system which provides an intuitive method of querying over one hundred database catalogs. In addition, the EOLS contains over 30 CDROMs of images from the Einstein X-ray…
Code Review consists in assessing the code written by teammates with the goal of increasing code quality. Empirical studies documented the benefits brought by such a practice that, however, has its cost to pay in terms of developers' time.…
Apache Spark is a Big Data framework for working on large distributed datasets. Although widely used in the industry, it remains rather limited in the academic community or often restricted to software engineers. The goal of this paper is…
We investigate the feasibility of high performance scientific computation using cloud computers as an alternative to traditional computational tools. The availability of these large, virtualized pools of compute resources raises the…
Spectropolarimetry, the observation of polarization and intensity as a function of wavelength, is a powerful tool in stellar astrophysics. It is particularly useful for characterizing stars and circumstellar material, and for tracing the…
The use of Python is noticeably growing among the scientific community, and Astronomy is not an exception. The power of Python consists of being an extremely versatile high-level language, easy to program that combines both traditional…