I clearly remember my pre-university days, when I was a member of an non-profit organisation called S.P.A.C.E in India. They were educating students from all over India on astronomy. Their way of education was most interesting. I was part of their practical sessions, including star-gazing sessions from remote parts of India and experiments to measure the circumference of the earth. They also provided their students with kits which included a magic stick to measure shadows, a sky map and a small telescope as well! I also won a nation-wide contest organised by them, which led me to be a part of the team to observe the total solar eclipse in Turkey in 2006. As I entered my university, I got lost into Computer Science and slowly my interest in astronomy dwindled. As my university life almost comes to an end, I have got the opportunity to rekindle my passion via the Google Summer of Code program. I will be contributing to Astropy under the umbrella of Python Software Foundation.
Astropy is a software package written in Python intended to assist astronomy related computations. I will be contributing to the specutils package. Spectral data has been collected over centuries in various formats. This package will enable reading of spectral data into easy to use data structures, manipulation of the data using utility functions and writing of the data into various formats. The most common format for storing spectral data is FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). This format is endorsed by both NASA and IAU. Supporting this format will be a major goal of this project. There are various spectral mappings that can be defined in a FITS file. These mappings define some functions, which give information on the wavelength (or energy or frequency) at a particular point in the data array. I will go into details of these mappings and how they are defined with FITS in subsequent blog posts.
Officially coding starts from tomorrow, 19th May 2014. I am looking forward to a successful project!
Astropy is a software package written in Python intended to assist astronomy related computations. I will be contributing to the specutils package. Spectral data has been collected over centuries in various formats. This package will enable reading of spectral data into easy to use data structures, manipulation of the data using utility functions and writing of the data into various formats. The most common format for storing spectral data is FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). This format is endorsed by both NASA and IAU. Supporting this format will be a major goal of this project. There are various spectral mappings that can be defined in a FITS file. These mappings define some functions, which give information on the wavelength (or energy or frequency) at a particular point in the data array. I will go into details of these mappings and how they are defined with FITS in subsequent blog posts.
Officially coding starts from tomorrow, 19th May 2014. I am looking forward to a successful project!
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