.Astronomy http://dotastronomy.com Astronomy meets the Internet Thu, 04 Aug 2016 09:36:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.3 Live Blog: .Astro 8 Day 1 http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-1/ http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-1/#respond Tue, 21 Jun 2016 09:00:36 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=2107 GOOD MORNING everyone! We are kicking off Day 1, the first official day of .Astronomy 8 at the beautiful Pembroke College, Oxford in the sunshine!

 

 

 

I kicked things off as the organiser to welcome everyone to the conference and give some advice on how to get the most out of this week and also refer everyone to our code of conduct this year.

Our first talk though is by Sarah Kendrew from ESA talking about JWST and .Astronomy – i.e. how do we make JWST a 21st century telescope?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah hands over to Bruno Merin who tells us all about ESA Sky a great tool for researchers and outreach showing an interactive map of the entire sky at various different wavelengths! It’s real whole sky maps for huge astronomical datasets including, GALEX, 2MASS, WISE, Herschel, Planck and many more! I can see the outreach potential of this tool sure, but as a tool for academics it excels itself! First of all, you can find data that would otherwise be hidden in the deeps of the web but also you can then make plots of the data in app too!

 

 

 

 

 

Next up we’re talking about hardware at .Astronomy. “Hardware?!”, I hear your cry “but I thought .Astronomy was a coding conference?” Well think again reader, we don’t just code we discuss and make all tools whether code free, software or hardware. Carl Ferkinhoff is introducing us to the idea of open hardware in the same sense of the word as open software. Check out the site here.

 

 

 

He goes on to tell us about his plan for automating telescopes at small telescopes across institutions in the US (for now) which are currently not used to their full potential. Ideally a network of these telescopes all following up on sources is the ultimate goal.

 

 

 

And now it’s the most important time of the day – coffee!

Hi this is Ellen (@sterrenellen), taking over from Becky for the second session of the day!

Ali talks about the Zooniverse project. How do you turn lots of data into scientific knowledge? The Zooniverse researchers want as many people and as many different people as possible to be able to contribute. In her PdD-days Ali had millions of pictures that were taken on the Serengeti with motion-triggered cameras, that would take years to sift through. She made a project on the Zooniverse platform called Snapshot Serengeti, and 1 million of the pictures were classified in 3 days! Every volunteer can say how many animals they see in the photo, what animals they see and what they are doing. Because the volunteers have to say what kind of animals they see, even if there is no consensus on what it is, there is information about the size and number. The volunteers and experts agree on the information in the photos 97% of the time, and considering the experts agree with each other about 98% of the time, this is fantastic!

  It is very easy to start your own project on the platform and let citizen scientists help you classify your data so you can turn it into beautiful science!

It’s James‘s turn to talk about instrumentation hacking. First, what makes a hack a hack? You have a need for results but no time. He works in fibre positioning for spectrographs and a few years ago he was involved in Starbugs. The starbugs were supposed to walk around and position themselves very accurately, but they didn’t work. They needed to be vacuum, but the powers that be thought that it would be too much work to make them work.

 

Instead of writing down lots of procedures and goals and making it a large project, a proof of concept should be able to be done quickly. James did exactly that and proved within a few days that vacuum starbugs actually work.

Hacking has value in a large organisations.

 

In the third talk Geert talks about open science. We are doing some things right (open acces on the ArXiv), but we need more than that. We need more facilities to embrace extreme openness, and not only provide outreach but also let everyone engage in science.

The Kepler mission was extremely closed, but K2 (essentially a giant hack of Kepler to make it work longer) has decided to open up the raw data to the public immediately. This means that we need to find new ways to reward the PI teams, but that shouldn’t stop the scientific community from opening up and making data more accessible so more fantastic science can be done.

 

K2 took the open approach: no proprietary data, funding competition, making community resources available. And because K2’s data is open, more unique authors have written papers and more early-career scientists are empowered to engage in the science.

And don’t forget: publication on Github is still public.

 

We then moved onto the Lightning Talks:

 

  • Aleks Scholz- Closed Science vs Open Science- he and Duncan Forgan have written a paper with a hashtag in the title! It’s about how to inform the public in the event of a SETI detection, but how to communicate with the public better in general.
  • Ashley Villar- Astrobites. An organisation completely run by graduate students, summarising arxiv papers in a way suitable for undergraduates. They also write guides and tutorials for astro tools and techniques. Get in touch if you’d like to be involved.
  • Edward Gomez- “No Such Thing as a Stupid Question” comic book. Head to bit.do/dotastro-comicbook to read it for yourself.. An essential part of science is asking questions! It;s released under a Creative Commons license, so use in your outreach!
  • Coleman K- Astronomy projects for the blind and visually impaired. He shows off his 3D printed galaxy (Whirlpool Galaxy). Get in touch if you have any ideas for further outreach projects.
  • Matthew Graham- NOAO Data Labs. An accessible archive of images and catalogues. People have already been spotting dwarf galaxies in the data!
  • Justyn Campbell-White- Classifying Stellar Bubbles using citizen science. We hope to find a shape classification scheme in the future.
  • Adam Avinson – “Pynterferometer“, a tool to explain interferometry. Great outreach tool which allows you to play around with dish locations and see how an image changes.
  • Trey Roby- A short history of JavaScript. JavaScript has been through its dark ages (1999-2009), but after a short renaissance we’re currently in the golden age. If you have a dark ages perspective of JavaSCript, check out the latest version!
  • Edward Gomez has another bite of the cherry- Asteroid Day (June 30th 2016). Check out http://asteroidday.lcogt.net, which allows you to tell Las Cumbres Observatory to observe an asteroid of your choice and then make a timelapse video of the data.

 

 

After a delicious college lunch (Thanks Pembroke!) we started the unconference sessions.  We met back at 17.00 to discuss what each group had come up with. Check the hashtags (with #dotastro) to see the twitter discussions.

 

 

  • #HoloIRL- This was a chance to show off HoloLens, an Augmented Reality headset. We saw a 3D model of the sun placed in the middle of the room, whilst being able to walk around it and view from different angles. Can we find a way to use it to model astronomical data? Possibly tomorrow!
  • #IntroJulia- Why would I use Julia instead of Python? Julia tries to solve the two language problem; i.e we write fast code in one language and “nice” code in another!
  • #EsaSkyFeat- Discuss possible new features for ESA sky. Spectra and Time series features, as well as solar system objects. Other features- An API, Target Lists as JSONs, a simpler version of ESA sky (for outreach?) which just has nice images instead of all the raw data.
  • #OpenHardware- Ensure that we have a place to go to talk about open hardware. Also discussed were existing open hardware projects.
  • #INTfigs- how can we make journal papers more interactive? Can we make things more reproducible as well? Who keeps the data and where? What are the technical problems to be solved? Great opportunity to add value to your papers this way! A lack of manpower to put the good ideas into practise is a problem at the moment. If you want to make an interactive figure,  talk to the journals-  these things are judged on a paper by paper basis at the moment.
  • #Pywhereisit- Where is <x> in python?! Check out astropy.userecho.com! It’s a feature request site for astropy. We’d like to see iraf-equivalent spectroscopic tools, a way to make tools more discoverable, and more IFU/datacube tools.
  • #DynaMap- How can we interactively view a map of a galaxy (for example) in a browser? Height maps, start coding in Canvas, etc were discussed.
  • #Naptime- Unfortunately no one wanted to talk about their dreams… 🙁
  • #HackCollector- how can we keep track of hacks made at dot astronomy? The only way at the moment is to look at blog posts made on the day. A hack-preserving hack is in the works, so stay tuned for tomorrow!
  • #AstroGames- What makes an astro game successful, and how do they tie in the educational aspect? Shout out to Super Planet Crash, Velocity Raptor and Kerbal Space Program (among many others). Future game ideas- link to Gravitational Waves, recently discovered exoplanet systems, many others!
  • #OxDjango- Exploration of database objects with Django, carrying on from yesterdays talk.
  • #AASWWT- How WWT has changed in the past few years. Examples of use of web controls in various sites, more use of WebGL. In the future, there’ll be no differences between the web client and native client.
  • #EduGageMent- Link between education and engagement. Distinction between working with a group there to learn something specific (education) and displaying your work (outreach) and a two way conversation (engagement). Sometimes these differences are unimportant, sometimes they’re key (e.g when talking to funding bodies).
  • #CoolTools- we shared a ton of cool tools! Here’s a link to the list we came up with. Productivity tools, bash tricks, onetab!
  • #AstroAlly- How we in the astro community can be allies on twitter. Just because you don’t feel that your voice has any power on twitter doesn’t mean that it’s powerless. Retweet things to (on some level) make a stand and add your voice. Check back for a blogpost in the near future!
  • #Croquet- Let’s all go play now!

And with that. Day 1 draws to a close. See you all tomorrow for a day full of hacks!

About Becky Smethurst

Becky is a PhD student in astrophysics working with the Galaxy Zoo team in Oxford on the link between morphology and quenching. Generally happy-go-lucky and overly enthusiastic about most everything.

More Posts (4)
]]> http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-1/feed/ 0 Live Blog: .Astro 8 Day Zero http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-zero/ http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-zero/#respond Mon, 20 Jun 2016 08:37:10 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=2075 This is a guest post by Sam Vaughan (@sam_astrophys) who will be live blogging .Astro day zero.

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day Zero of the 8th .Astronomy conference. Check out the wiki or our Day Zero Guide if (like me!) you’re new to .Astro or want a refresher on what Day Zero is or why it’s important. I’ll be doing my best to keep this page updated throughout the day with all the various talks and sessions we’ve got planned. Many thanks to the the LOC, Brain Trust, our sponsors the Royal Astronomical Society, American Astronomical Society and University of Oxford Astrophysics and especially our brilliant organiser Becky Smethurst for making all of this possible!

 

9.30 am: Becky kicks things off by welcoming us all to Oxford, and asking the important questions- what actually is an API key?! I’m promised that I’ll find out by the end of the day. Sarah Kendrew then introduces the .Astro format for us newbies who haven’t been before, and goes over some common questions she’s asked about the conference: What is it? What happens at .Astro? And at the end of the day. what have we actually been doing? My favourite answer describes the point of .Astro as “building a tech-aware community for future science and public engagement”. We also hear some post-conference quotes  from previous events, which range from “Most inspirational conference ever!” to “these kids need to stop wasting their time on the internet”.

 

10:00 am: Arna Karick talks about something that’s been on my mind in the lead up to the conference- “what makes a good hack?”. They’re small projects which solve one problem, executed as quickly as possible. They can be technical, but aren’t just about coding. We hear examples of fashion hacks, musical hacks and even theatrical ones from previous hack days. The most important tip is kept till last- embrace the silliness and have fun!

10:45 am: After a quick coffee break, Demitri Muna talks to us about “Languages 101”. Yes, there are other languages out there apart from Python apparently. We’re introduced to the “Model, View, Controller” form of code design, and told to stay away from PHP (as it violates this general principle). Working with databases, which will almost certainly come in handy on hack day, is made much easier with PostgreSQL or SQLite. Writing raw SQL gets very tedious very quickly, so using an “object relational mapper” is a must! SQLalchemy is a python package to handle all this simply and pythonic-ly. There’s a summary of D3, a really powerful tool for data visualisation, and Emscripten, which is described as “basically magic”- it takes compiled C/C++/Fortran code and converts it into a javascript library that you can use in a browser. A great example of this is fitsjs, which does this for C libraries made to work with fits files. There are also a load of tutorials from .AStro 7 available here, which I’m sure will come in handy.

 

11:30 am: “Git Good”, an introduction to git by Scott Thomas. Git is a source control program, designed to make structured backups of your work. Why do you need to use git? Well…

 

Git also allows you to back up your work efficiently and easily collaborate with others. There are some nice graphical tools for working with git listed in the Day Zero Guide, but Scott mainly tells us about using git on the command line. Top tip- you can name your commits using git tag to more easily go back to them later, without typing in the hash or counting backwards from HEAD.

12:15 pm: We’re onto the Lightning Tutes, short sessions where audience members talk about tools they’ve made, things they use lots or stuff they just want people to know about.

  • Arna Karick- techsavvyastronomer.io: a website to “bring web development and tech skills to astronomers”. See the list of available tools and huge list of tutorials, or join the community of toolbuilders yourself!
  • Matthew Graham- Analysis of all scientific projects on GitHub. Turns out that many people use GitHub to spam their own companies, and your nice 500 word Readme might just be full of nonsense!
  • Jonathan Fay- World Wide Telescope: a way to seamlessly bring together and visualise data from space and ground-based telescopes to explore the universe from your computer.
  • Carl Ferkinhoff- Open Science framework: an online lab notebook, a way to browse and organise all your projects in one (free!) place. Link your git repositories or ipython notebooks, and make a read-only copy of all your work.
  • Chris North- Chromoscope: View the sky in all wavelengths from radio to gamma-ray. You can add your own all-sky data (e.g a CMB map) and interface very nicely with Worldwide Telescope.
  • Becky Smethurst- Get a notification in your terminal (on OSX) when your code is finished- just add “os.system(‘tput bel’)” to your python code.
  • Andy Casey- PySide: a python module to make GUIs in python. Drag and drop interface design with integrated matplotlib widgets.
  • Edward Gomez- Virtual Environments: use virtualenv or conda. Very useful for making self contained projects.

 

1:15 pm: After lunch, Lisa Ballard tells us how to take our hacks online. It’s possible to integrate WordPress with python, to automate your website building- to, for example, scrape Mars images from the HIRISE  camera and make a continuously scrolling website to view them all. We also hear how difficult it is to organise the logistics of making a ball pit full of exoplanets, but how python can come to your rescue…

 

1:45 pm: Brian Cherinka gives us a Flask tutorial. Head to his GitHub to follow along for yourself

 

2:30 pm: Phillip Plewa gives us a D3.js tutorial. We each make an interactive star chart by editing the code on BlockBuilder.org, ending up with an array of twinkling stars in just a few lines of code.

 

3:45 pm: Thomas Robitaille describes how to use python and webscraping to access remote resources. He has a fully interactive python notebook here  to show off the beautiful soup and requests python libraries.

 

4:15 pm: Head over here to follow Edward Gomez’s Django tutorial.

 

5:00 pm: Geert Barentsen tells us about argparse, the python command line argument parser. Using sys.argv is a pain, and python comes with argparse- so there’s no reason to keep using sys.argv! He also explains how to make your code into a package which other people can install. Finally, we get a quick peek at click, another python command line parser which builds upon the argparse module.

And that brings Day Zero to a close! Thanks to all of the speakers for a great introduction to a wide variety of tools. I hope everyone is looking forward to the next few days of talks and hacking!

About Becky Smethurst

Becky is a PhD student in astrophysics working with the Galaxy Zoo team in Oxford on the link between morphology and quenching. Generally happy-go-lucky and overly enthusiastic about most everything.

More Posts (4)
]]> http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2016/06/live-blog-astro-8-day-zero/feed/ 0 Sign up for .Astronomy 8 now OPEN http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/12/sign-up-for-astronomy-8-now-open/ Wed, 02 Dec 2015 11:26:32 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1870 We’re happy to announce that .Astronomy 8 will be held at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK on June 20th-23rd 2016. Details are available here
Registration is OPEN until 31st January 2016. The sign-up form is available here.

.Astronomy 6 Conference Photo [Image Credit: Dimitri Muna]

 We aim to host approximately 60 attendees for a three-ish-day conference all about astronomy online! We will bring together an international group of people with a mix of skills, expertise, and backgrounds; though attendees bring a wide range of talents, .Astro is not just for those who are already confident.

.Astronomy is all about developing web tools to enhance research, public engagement and teaching outputs. The conference will include a series of talks, multiple open “un-conference” sessions (where participants will be able to propose their own informal sessions) and a full day hacking on awesome, innovative projects. We will also offer an optional .Astronomy Day 0 – an opportunity for people to hear about previous Hack Day projects and learn about the tools most frequently used to make them.

We typically get many more sign-ups than we can host at the conference and we use the information you provide on the form to select a group of participants with diverse ideas, experience and backgrounds: so please tell us what we need to know about you! Also feel free to nominate anyone and anything you think is interesting. We’d like to particularly encourage women and minorities to sign up.

To read about what occurs during .Astronomy and the Hack Days, see the blog posts
here and here or checkout the hashtag,#dotastro on Twitter.

Three of my personal favorite hacks include

1) D3PO – Interactive plotting for astronomers:http://d3po.org/>
2) AAS Job Register Visualized – http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~vmoss/jobvis/
3) “Don’t Call Me Colin” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFMoEpj-v7o

Please email info@dotastronomy.com or any of the LOC if you have any questions. Thank you!

SOC:
Becky Smethurst
Sarah Kendrew
Chris Lintott

LOC:
Edward Gomez
Mark Richardson
Sandor Kruk
Ellen Schallig
Sam Vaughan

About Becky Smethurst

Becky is a PhD student in astrophysics working with the Galaxy Zoo team in Oxford on the link between morphology and quenching. Generally happy-go-lucky and overly enthusiastic about most everything.

More Posts (4)
]]> Live Blog: .Astro 7 Day 3 http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/11/live-blog-astro-7-day-3/ Thu, 05 Nov 2015 23:47:38 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1727 This is a guest blog post by James Gilbert (@labjg), a former astro instrumentation engineer and current graduate student at Oxford Uni.

The final day! The prospect of being thrown back into our day jobs looms ever nearer.  But not to worry, as we kick off with a wrap-up of yesterday’s hack day projects:

HERE GOES!

We begin with Radio Yourself, presented by Kirsten Gottschalk!

Next up is Darren Croton and his group’s views on what makes a good webpage-building approach for research professionals. The conclusion is that a good HTML5 template can go a long way, with html5up.net being a great example.

Aidan Hotan wows us next with the ‘literal virtual’ observatory.  We took a virtual drive around Western Australian radio telescopes via a 3D gaming engine.  Still lots to add (including collision detection, much to the relief of the virtual dipoles), but the concept is proved.  Will we be observing with VR headsets soon? 😮

Becky Smethurt gives us an update on her idea, which, as of 2am, works!  It’s a map that shows the global reach of paper authors, and it looks great.  I’m reminded of airline network maps.  It’s a great tool for visualising not only where your collaborators are in the world, but where they aren’t.  I find myself wondering whether I can justify travel to the Caribbean next year, for the purpose of finding new contacts.

James Allen shows us the ‘Friendly VO’ team’s effort, which is a now operational way to add your own entries to the Virtual Observatory database 😮

Cormac Purcell presents progress with the “Friendly Virtual Radio Interferometer”, evidently a large project, but one the team have gotten off to a flying start. As well as Cormac, the team is made up of Nuria Lorente, George Howitt, Andrew O’Brien, and Demitri Muna (described as a “fly-in mentor”). They have a Python-based backend doing all the number-crunching, and a Javascript frontend for visualisation. Work is ongoing!

Jennifer Piscionere shows us her diversity breakdown map of the astronomical community, populated by data from the Google survey that you can still fill out.  It’s a really neat visualisation of the career paths we take.

Surely one of the shining successes from yesterday is robo-ph, the arXiv-scraping, research-reading text-to-speech podcast bot.  The team at the lectern includes Tom Robitaille, Katie Mack, Josh Peek, and Arna Karick.  They demonstrate a fully-functional 2-hour long podcast that has fully vocalised the latest astrophysical discoveries, which the user can skip through easily.  Each paper category has its own jingle, and the voices randomise gender and regional accent.  The idea is to allow drivers, walkers, teeth-brushers, or even those with a sight impediment, to keep abreast with the arXiv.  The sophistication they’ve already managed to bake in is fabulous.  And you can subscribe RIGHT NOW!  Head over to iTunes and search ‘robo-ph’.

Vanessa Moss took an opportunity to continue the Cosmic Pudding saga this year.  She photographed a bunch of dotAstro attendees with the pudding, and fed them into the engine for koalastothemax.  It turns out one can quite easily to-the-max anything one likes!  Also, there’s a website quiz to help calculate the arXiver auto image selection effectiveness.  You can contribute stats yourself!  Link here.

And now.. and NOW LIVE MUSIC.  Amanda Bauer says she wants to contribute a live muso-hack right now.  So cool.  Being recorded!  A second original song follows, “written for an astronaut, that no astronaut has ever heard”, because said astronaut didn’t show up at the event Amanda wrote the song for.  But we’re enjoying it now 🙂

The final presentation, from yours truly, is an update on the #spaceshark project.  Five of us worked to produce a simple and affordable astro-pointing device that will point to (and track!) lots and lots of astronomical objects.  It has a web interface and is controlled over the cloud.  Oh, and we stuck a shark to it, hence #spaceshark is born!  The team is made up of myself,  Pascal Elahi, Kieran Leschinski, Simon Mutch,  and Dany Vohl, with crucial graphics contributions (awesome logo) by Kirsten Gottschalk.  We think the project has all the makings of a great outreach tool; watch this space!

AND ONTO THE TALKS

Nuria Lorente

Nuria Lorente gives the first scheduled talk of the day following coffee, on a topic rather close to my heart as well as hers.  As a self-confessed “walker of the fence” between astronomy and engineering, she talks about the differing philosophies and points of view of scientists and engineers.

Software is fundamental to research – something we can all agree with I’m sure – but does it get the recognition it deserves?  With a tip of the hat to the ADASS conference last week, Nuria summarises the changes in astronomy over the years: We used to run in “hero mode”, when a talented astronomer was “locked in a room” to produce some fabulous tool for him (“and it was usually a him”) and his colleagues to use in their next big discovery.  These days, it’s different.  Software infrastructure has become so important that we need proper engineering practice to get it right.

So what’s the difference between a typical astronomer and a ‘proper’ software engineer?  Astronomers often have no formal software development training, but they are also tempted to code quickly without consideration of the bigger picture.  This might be forgivable, but in the era of large technical scientific projects, it can be costly.

Nuria’s personal tips for astronomers working with pure software engineers are:

  • Remember that they are not astronomers.
  • Remind them that you are not a software engineer.
  • Remember they don’t have to know as much about the project as you do, but they may need more detail in non-obvious areas.
  • Be mindful of using acronyms and abbreviations.
  • Put your needs before you personal interests – budgets may not allow all the features you’d ‘really like’.
  • Focus on small, short-term goals that lead to larger goals.
  • Don’t be a client. Be a partner in the development process.

The software spectrum goes from private use files (junk.py) all the way to facility packages such as astropy or observatory control software.  It’s important to make the distinction, but all have a place.  We don’t need to write requirements documents for our little scripts and tools, but what’s important is recognising when you do need these things.

Nuria’s closing remarks are to realise that software is not free, and that communication is crucial.

Sze-leung Cheng

Sze-leung has come from Japan to talk to us about outreach initiatives from the International Astronomical Union (IAU).  The IAU has a bunch of important aims surrounding global engagement in astronomy, making astronomy accessible to different groups of people.

The IAU uses top-down and bottom-up methods to ‘reach the people’.  The former method uses a global distribution of IAU representatives for spreading information and promoting events.  But this is not perfect.  The bottom-up model is rooted in astronomy clubs and organisations that are already out there.  directory.iau.org, which is still somewhat in development, is a place for interested parties to link up and contribute to global astronomical awareness.

The IAU is open to feedback on social media strategies moving forward.  He highlights language barrier issues in getting your message to everyone you’d like to.

#NameExoWorlds comes up next, and Sze-leung is surprised (as am I) that not everyone in the room had heard of this campaign to allow the public to vote for exoplanet names.  The campaign closed last week, with a whopping 640,000 votes cast by the public.  Fabulous!

This year is the International Year of Light, and a couple of web projects get a mention, including a live light pollution map at globeatnight-network.org.  People can measure light pollution with an iPhone app in order to contribute, but right now not on Android.  Are you an Android developer?  Could you help?

The problem of multi-lingual translation comes up again.  It’s clear that this is big hurdle for IAU and their mission to reach people around the world.  Translating astronomical content presents unique challenges in itself, and conventional automated translation services just don’t cut it.  What’s the best approach?

Kirsten Gottschalk

Kirsten has come to talk to us on behalf of ICRAR, about the outreach challenges in radio astronomy.  Right off the bat, we’re told that a big problem is that “people don’t really know what radio astronomy is”.  In an effort to enlighten school students, ICRAR have created a range of ‘mini-sites’ that focus on individual physical and astronomical concept.  We see a cool demo for the EM spectrum at spectrum.icrar.org; this actually looks VERY useful.  I wish I’d have known about this when I was attempting to explain spectroscopy to young’ns last year.

ICRAR have identified a few factors that would improve their outreach efforts: accessibility is, of course, one of them.  Also important is a better understanding of how people relate simple terms such as ‘radio’ to sound and not vision.

The spectral mini-site project is still in its infancy.  Kirsten puts out a plea for multi-wavelength images of object.  Could you help?

Another mini-site to be released in the future is one on redshift.  Another important astro concept I’m sure you’ll agree.  It’s no ordinary site though; there are animations and wonderful graphics.  They touch on Hubble’s law, expanding and shrinking universes, and even animate that.  It’s all done in Javascript, CSS and HTML, and is low-bandwidth to boot.  Clearly the product of a huge amount of work.  I’ll be keeping my eye on this!

More super-cool modules are to come, along with a teaching guide.  Got real data to contribute?  Get in touch!

LIGHTING TALKS! *PSSCHAEEUUGHH* (that was a lightning strike sound)

I start by telling people about the magic of Cython for speeding up slow Python code and for interfacing with C++ libraries (super useful for hardware APIs in the lab).  Check out the tutorial video I used to learn Cython in one day here.

Arna Karick tells us about thehackerwithin.org, which is a way for university students and staff to take part in timetables part-taught-part-hackday meetings.  The idea is evidently spreading around the world, and Arna tells us about the various ‘Hacky Hours’ they host at Swinburne.

Demitri Muna is up next, first of all showing trillianverse.org.  Trillian is open-source (seeking contributors) and enables you to take your analysis code ‘to the data’, rather than having to bring (download) the data to your local analysis code.  Neat idea, addressing a problem that will surely become larger as we build larger and larger datasets.  Demitri’s second topic is his very own Mac application for easily – I mean actually easily – viewing  FITS files.  Think of it like Mac Preview for astronomical data (and awesome).  It’ll be release early next year, and if you run OS X you might just not be able to do without it.

UNCONFERENCE SESSIONS

Here is a rather purple photo of this afternoon’s unconference topics, as they stand:

Session summaries as follows.

Session 1

#futureweb How do we future-proof our web stuff? Agreed was that it’s unrealistic to expect anything made today to ;just work’ in a decade. It pays to think about the tools you use, and make sure you’re using them for the right reasons, not just because they’re the latest thing.  Maintain your sites and code as time goes on. “There’s no magic wand”.

#intertech How do we make more solid connections and collaborations with industry and tech companies?  Can we do internships at tech companies as scientists?  Would universities support this?  An example of a successful collaboration is the Worldwide Telescope with Microsoft.  We need to make it clear what the benefits of these links are, not least with the companies themselves.  We’re not on the radar of the massive tech companies, and getting anything out of them is hard.  A higher impact might be offered to startup companies instead.

#betterburst How do we improve Jen’s astro career ‘burst’ visualisation in terms of gathering the data.  Given the nature of the survey, it’s important to make sure you include everyone’s specific stories, ethnic origins, etc.  And how do we capture data from people who have left astronomy and now work elsewhere?

Session 2

#commdata How do we better bridge the gap between software developers and astronomers? Do we want to bridge it? Lots of insight into how people perceive themselves, with some in the group seeing themselves as astronomers who code, some as software engineers who happen to be astronomy (with perhaps no care at all for citation count) etc.  Perhaps

#simapp  The vision: load any HDF5 simulation file, and be able to visualise and explore it.  Work is ongoing!

Coffee break (with live performance)

A special coffee break, featuring live courtroom drama “A Few Good Theories” starring Steve Crawford, Robert Hollow, Vanessa Moss, and myself.  In this play, a recent publication concerning the rate of expansion of the universe has sparked debate among the astronomy community and its author is put on trial.  The year is 1996.

In case the name didn’t give it away, the play is based on a classic scene from “A Few Good Men”, and the brilliant adaptation was written last night by Steve and Tamara Davis, with assistance from Madhura Killedar, Kirsten Gottschalk, Aaron Robotham, and glasses of wine.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!

Session 3

#hackarchive How can we better preserve the output of dotastronomy, especially the hacks? We definitely need a central page that lists all the hacks. Github will be used to manage the content of the page, with links and supporting documentation for the hack in question.  Unfinished hacks should also be recorded, in case someone wants to resurrect them in the future.  Ongoing projects could have a forked version of any Github code that shows the state of the project at the end of the hack day, in order to keep a record.

Added at the last moment was:

#codeconduct What are the expectations around a code of conduct for dotastronomy?  Other conferences have these, and can provide a good template.  It’s important to make sure that we’re inclusive, have harassment policies and procedures, and are ethical in our creations in terms of copyright, attribution and so on.  “Stay tuned” is the message; something should be in place soon.

HACK DAY PRIZES

  • Best hack for the community: Astro career lifecycle survey! (Prize: Magnetic map of Sydney)
  • Most number of people dragged into one hack: Pudding to the max! (Prize: mini Sydney ferry)
  • Best use of venue: A Few Good Theories impromptu play! (Prize: 3D puzzle of Sydney Opera House)
  • Best use of colour: Radio Yourself! (Prize: Stickers!)
  • Fastest progress hack: What’s Up! (Prize: A skymap)
  • ‘Hackstars’ – people contributing to loads of hacks: Tom Robitaille (digital-memory-based card game), Lisa Ballard (3D space shuttle), Demitri Muna (Opera House Puzzle)
  • Most overly ambitious hack proposal: Virtual Radio Interferometer! (Prize: Space shuttle 3D puzzle)
  • Best interactive visualisation: MRO virtual tour! (Prize: mini Sydney ferry)
  • Most academically useful hack: Friendly VO! (Prize: ‘Story cubes’ game)
  • Most useful beyond dotastro: Robo-ph! (Prize: Inflatable kangaroo)
  • Best use of dangerous local wildlife: #spaceshark! (WOO!) (Prize: inflatable kangaroo and space stickers)

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The dotastro Braintrust!

The live-bloggers!

Tom the AV guy!

Andy Green for being a tireless photographer.

AND THAT’S THAT

What a meeting! This has been my first dotastro, but I really hope it’s not my last.  I’ve found the spirit and atmosphere to have something I’ve never experienced at conferences before, and I suspect its fluid and partially unplanned nature is a major factor in that.  I also think there’s a willingness to drop any sort of nonsense professional façade and be equally honest about what you don’t know, what you do know, you’re good at, what you’re not interested in in the slightest, and what you’d like to learn more about.  And when you’re surrounded by such people, it’s far easier to be that way yourself.  Good on ya dotastro, for being REAL.

About Amanda Bauer

Research Astronomer and Outreach Officer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | More Posts (3)
]]> Day 2: Hack Day http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/11/day-2-hack-day/ Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:49:22 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1715  

 

Hello there! Checking in for the day, and day 2 is everyone’s favourite day: Hack Day! I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s hack pitches and seeing what everyone comes up with over the course of the day. And we have a ukelele!

We’re introducing a new #dotastrohelp hash tag for finding, you guessed it, .Astro help – use it freely and we will do our best to provide answers.

OK, here’s an overview of the pitches – heavily condensed as your blogger needs to go work on a hack.

  • your webpage sucks! build a better professional webpage (Darren)
  • visualise astronomers’ career paths (Jennifer)
  • geographical visualisation of paper citations (Becky)
  • better data linking to VO (James A)
  • an astro-ph discussion podcast (Josh)
  • an astro-ph audio version (Josh)
  • resource page for astronomer-data scientist career movers (Arna)
  • nice web interface to astroplan – build custom tools for observation planning (Brett)
  • an introductory tutorial video for Astropy contribution (Brett)
  • collaborative tools for Pulse@Parks students & teachers (George)
  • an “astropointer” – a motorized alt-az mount to teach coordinate systems and the night sky (Jamie G)
  • a web tool for planning meetings across timezones and locations (Madhura)
  • better colour schemes for visualizing astronomical data (Madhura)
  • correlation citations with other paper metrics (Manodeep)
  • visualizing interferometry (Cormac)
  • novel visualizations of astronomical data (Dany)
  • everything #tothemax! (Vanessa)
  • cloudy science – better word clouds of new astro-ph postings (Vanessa)
  • website of astronimical images inviting community contributions (Steve)
  • build “virtual observatory visits” (Aiden/Kirsten)
  • kids’ games to teach astronomical concepts (Brian)
  • webGL tools for public outreach & education (Dorotea)
  • commenting platform for astro-ph (Andy Green)
  • “hacks to product” – making your hacks more visible/relevant (Nuria)
  • astro cartoons/comics (Arna)
  • Astropy love song challenge (Arna)

 

[12:45] Hacking is happening around the Museum:

and there are a bunch of hacks under development around me that sound fabulous.

Jennifer Piscionere’s project is to visualize astronomers’ career tracks, and her team have created a survey to gather data for this. If you work in astro, go provide them with some good data by responding to this survey.

I’ll post more updates throughout the day.

[15:40]

I’m loving some of the first hack results coming out. Jennifer’s career survey has some first data, and she’s produced a great visualization of the preliminary results:

I’m hearing much chatter of creating maps, converting coordinate systems, developing ways of letting users upload content to webpages, and robo-voices reciting scientific papers. There’s a huge range of tools on display on all the laptops screens around me, and I expect to be amazed with what everyone has cooked up over the course of the day.

[17:00] Hack updates!

The first demo is from Jamie Gilbert, who’s building an alt-az pointer to be used for education. He’s built a web interface to the device, so that it can now point to objects in the sky by querying Simbad for its coordinates. Neat! Tea Sets Wholesale Tea Sets Amber Jewelry Sleeping Bags

Aaron shows us his updated Astroplan web app to help you plan astronomical observations with a lovely interface. Check it out!

Tom Donaldson presents the “friendly VO” work – his team have been developing a web app that will allow us to make our data more VO-friendly.

Brett has worked with Lisa, who showed us Spaceprob.es yesterday, to map the locations of satellites and space probes in the Solar System. This can update in real time as the planets and probes move.

Dorotea has created an awesome black hole web visualization with WebGL.

Robo-ph lives! From now on you can listen to astro-ph on your way to work via the automated Robo-ph podcast – available in iTunes now!

Vanessa has created a new “To the max” version based on all of our pictures with her favourite pet, Cosmic Pudding.

Over 50 people have responded to Jennifer’s survey and she’s produced a great infographic of astronomer career paths.

Tamara developed an interactive cosmology tutorial using Shiny- I can see this being very useful for cosmology dunces – i.e. me.

Good progress on commentable astro-ph from Andy.

 

 

About Sarah Kendrew

Postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Oxford.

Web | Twitter | Google+ | More Posts (2)
]]> Live Blog: .Astro 7 Day 1 http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/11/live-blog-astro-7-day-1/ Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:07:27 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1652 Good morning all – this live blog post is being written by Becky Smethurst (@becky1505) expect rambling excitement about everything and anything.

Day 1 of .Astronomy 7 is kicking off at the Police & Justice Museum on Circular Quay in Sydney! This means that most people got to travel to the conference by ferry this morning as well, which was an extra added bonus.

 

It’s a great venue, with a lot of historical significance; one of our breakout rooms for the unconference sessions this afternoon is even in the old courtroom. Excitement so far has been about the Blueberry yogurt filled crêpes served by the wonderful catering staff here and that the coffee comes in bags, just like tea. Our minds are blown. DIY, self brewing coffee – it’s so hipster it’s dangerous.

Amanda Bauer, our fearless leader is currently welcoming all the participants to .Astronomy 7 with an introduction to the Southern Hemisphere sky and the original constellation myths of the Gadigal people – including the emu! Kicking off this morning with the Official Opening of the conference we’re thrilled to have Professor Mary O’Kane (speaker count, 0M:1F), who is the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer. She says she’s dabbled with astronomy before but her main field is in speech recognition – another field which struggles with big data. This problem of big data is what inspires young people into the sciences and she has praised the field of astronomy for managing to do that so effectively, including encouraging women into astronomy. The conference is now declared officially open by Prof. O’Kane! Tea Sets Wholesale Tea Sets Amber Jewelry Sleeping Bags

  She also encouraged participants of .Astro 7 to stay in touch, have fun and always come back to visit Australia. I think that’s definitely the mind set of everyone in the room right now; with an emphasis on fun and hack time! And segwaying beautifully from these themes we now have Tom Robitaille (@astrofrog, speaker count 1M:1F) talking about Astropy and the open source revolution in astronomy. First of all he’s defining what we actually mean when we say “open source” – something that has a license that gives the right to study, change and redistribute the code but what makes us really warm and fuzzy inside is code that is fully open to development as well.

A great example of code that has been developed completely openly is astropy – a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python which has been contributed to by a huge amount of people. Tom is currently giving us the backstory of the project: all the discussions from the early days of astropy are all archived and so we can go back and see how the package developed from individual teams working on separate functions, to a collaborative wiki, to coordination meetings in 2011/12/13, to open source development on GitHub.

Slight aside: a scary sounding alarm has just started going off – has a prisoner escaped?! Wait, no it’s stopped – whoever they were they can’t be that dangerous. I’m sure all the participants are safe. Oh no! IT’S GOING OFF AGAIN! Everyone is currently mesmerised as Tom now shows us a codeflower of development commits to the astropy code (I’ll try and get him to send it to me later so that you too, reader, can also experience this joy – see below, never say I don’t follow through for you) which can be produced because Astropy follows an open development model using the issues and pull request features provided by GitHub. Sometimes the discussions on some of these issues can get seriously out of hand with so many developers invested in such a project – people want to make sure that any code committed to the project is correct. In order to ensure this there are over 10,000 tests that have been set up over the past couple of years to check that any code committed won’t break anything else. This is done through the power of things like TRAVIS (MacOSX and Linux) – services like these are free and Tom encourages us all to use them for testing our projects. The next big challenge for these open development projects is giving credit to those that have contributed says Tom (something that’s difficult when more people contribute each year); the default previously was to publish a paper about astropy – in the code section of A&A but with some initial push against a referee who wasn’t sure whether there was any relevant science. Problem is astropy has had three public releases since this paper was published, so people should not read this paper to familiarise themselves with the project. The publication process makes it so that by the time the paper is officially published the information if obsolete – it’s only done so people get credit with citations. Something with this system is definitely broken!

Currently the male to female ratio of contributors is 90:10 in the astropy project, which is generally better than computer science as a whole but Tom suggests a possible hack idea for looking at gender diversity in development projects over time.

So that was a very well received talk by the audience with some interesting points raised – perhaps we’ll even have some unconference sessions proposed later this afternoon on these themes. Next up, we have Lisa Ballard (@BasilLeaf, speaker count 1M:2F) talking about Cataloging the World’s Active Space Probes: How We Made the Spacebrob.es Website. She currently is very jet lagged having travelled all the way from Oakland, California to be here! She is a web developer by trade but is here today to talk about one of her side projects spaceprob.es – a catalog of all the active space missions sent by humanity – “active” in the sense that they are still communicating with earth. She was inspired by the awesome howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

Spaceprob.es consists of 3 apps – a static website with all the information about each probe (built with Jekyll, which Lisa is currently giving us a super quick example of how to do that – it looks super easy so please reader, go and have a play around with it!), a space probe distance API and a news app.

 

The problem that people had with Jekyll is that it’s a static website and people wanted DATA from this kind of a website as well. So Lisa wanted to try and get access to the data at Deep Space Network Now (DSNN) through scraping the html feed and so built the space probe distance app with flask – because Jekyll is cool but sometimes you want to use Python! But now Lisa is explaining how they don’t always rely on DSNN for probes that are on/around a specific planet or moon because they’re reported to be at slightly different distances (so people get freaked out!) and instead use PyEphem to calculate how far away each planet or moon is.

The future of spaceprob.es includes: i) translation of the site into many different languages, ii) schematics of the Solar System with positions of each space probes (this could possibly be something people work on at the hack day tomorrow!) and iii) preparing for the time when there’s so many space probes that the site becomes too complicated to maintain and they have to take it down! Now after a lovely networking filled coffee break over some Lamington cake (when in Rome after all) we’re caffeinated and ready to rumble again. The unconference white board is slowly being filled with ideas and the anticipation for the next talk is definitely growing. We have another non-astronomer Alice Williamson (@all_isee, speaker count: 1M:3F), a postdoc at the University of Sydney talking about her work on Open Source Malaria – A New Way of Finding Medicines. She’s starting by giving us non-experts a bit of background on Malaria and it’s devastating impacts on the world population, particularly children. The discovery of Artemisinin (something that won this year’s Nobel prize in medicine) was hailed as a cure but unfortunately now there is evidence that a drug resistant strain has developed. So we need new medicines – but funding doesn’t always go to research (only 1.3% of the cash makes it to direct research!) and so Alice’s team has gone into collaborative research with the Open Source Malaria project and she presents us with the “six rules” the team followed to do this.

Recently, Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, hiked the price of a promising new malaria medicine from $13.50 to $750 per dose overnight – instead the Open Source Malaria team want to show that with open source research that this can be produced without this huge cost by reducing the barrier to entry and involving high school & undergraduate students in the search for the cure for malaria. A question from the audience was raised about whether getting involved in such a project is damaging to young researchers at the start of the careers? Alice says maybe to ask her in 6 years when her grant runs out! But she is aware that it doesn’t follow the traditional path of producing many first author papers that hiring committee’s generally look for. Luckily most of the pharmaceutical companies seem to be very supportive of the project.

And now for something completley different – and back to a favourite theme of previous .Astronomy conferences from Dany Vohl (speaker count 2M:3F) who’s going to talk about Astronomy in the Petascale Data Era: storage, transfer and visualization. But the age old question: what is big data? It is a broad expression:

And so however we define it – we generally need data compression and so a big discussion in astro in the past couple of years has been which data format/model is the bed for big data? FITS? HDF5? JPEG2000? ASDF? Well our data is generally very visual so why not use the JPEG2000? Dany presents some convincing arguments for using this for both observational (noise reduction & compression) and  simulation data. For dealing with 3D spectral data cubes, Dany suggests that the next generation is to use a “visualisation cave”.

So Dany et al. are currently working on how to do this effeciently with the DECam survey – testing this with a  ~1GB fits file, shipping from Chile to Oz this took ~20m/file whereas with JPEG2000 it took about 1min/file! So definitely promising results from the OziPortal at the University of Melbourne. A question from the crowd is that have we got the kit on our laptops to already open and access these JPEG2000 files? Answer is yes! Preview can actually open these files and even the header information. Next up is Yeshe Fenner (@AstroAustralia speaker count 2M:4F) who’s the Executive Officer from AAL, talking about Investing in astronomy infrastructure, and lessons building a federated data hub. Investment from 2007-2015 can be compared to scientific output – but where the funding has gone compared to where the publications are coming from does not match up – only 4% went to eResearch yet 32% of publications are coming from theory & computation fields – so Yeshe is discussing why these pictures don’t match up. A lot of effort has therefore been put into the All Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) to combat this which has so far had a lot of successes but also Yeshe discusses the lessons learned by both the science and organisational teams. She asks the room: what services should an eAstro hub provide?

 

  There’s definitely a buzz in the room building now for everyone’s (well, mine) favourite part of .Astro (apart from lunch) the ⚡️LIGHTNING TALKS⚡️. These are super quick, maximum 3 minute talks open to the floor for anyone who wants to present something cool/awesome/eye opening/terrifying/humbling/inspiring/beautiful/technical/quite interesting. Who knows what we’ll hear in the next half an hour or so before lunch?! First up is Katie Mack (@AstroKatie, speaker count 2M:5F) who’s going to talk to us about using Twitter. She’s made a temporary account @dotAstroKatie for the purpose of this to show us how to use twitter most efficiently to give your followers what they want to see. Next up is Brett Morris (@brettmor, speaker count 3M:5F) who’s highlighting first how awesome the Google Summer of Code project is for getting summer students to contribute to e.g. astropy. He was one this summer and he developed a function called astroplan which is an open source Python package to help astronomers plan observations which he is now demonstrating and it looks awesome (check it out here)! He wants to pitch a hack project which makes a web interface to the function as well. Next up is Tamara Davis (@tamarastro, speaker count 3M:6F) who’s demoing the Marz project (written by Sam Hinton) to which you can drag and drop some data, e.g. a FITS file and extract the data, such as the spectra etc and visualise it in the browser AND fit to the data with database templates that you can customise. The demo she showed uploaded 400 spectra in one fits file (on conference WiFi!) which were all processed and displayed in the space of a lightning talk… AMAZING! Last but not least is George Hobbs (speaker count 4M:6F) who’s talking about data archives, working in China and that Julia is better than Python…(the live blogger objects here, Python FTW!) . First he points us to data.csiro.au which is collecting as much data as possible including almost all new pulsar observations from Parkes and points out the potential for students to do some great science. George then points out that as amazing as this is – it doesn’t work in China – makes use of google code which is blocked there (also VPN’s, CAPTCHA, Twitter, Amazon), but China is a huge proportion of the world’s population – let’s not forget about them when we develop code! And on that humbling and eye-opening note it’s now time to sample the delicious food that the Justice & Police Museum have layed on for us and also to get voting on this afternoon’s unconference sessions! Already the board is filling up – people even went there first after the talks finished, rather than making a beeline for the buffet table. Serious dedication to the cause at this year’s conference. This blogger is impressed. And hungry.

  So we’ve returned from lunch and scheduled the first half of the unconference sessions for this afternoon.

We will all be summarising our unconference sessions in a debrief at 5pm but until then we have our second half of sessions scheduled for the rest of the afternoon:

So we have all returned from our discussions and will be reporting back on what we’ve found. I’ll refer to each session by it’s assigned hashtag – if you’re interested you can see what people live tweeted during that discussion by searching the hashtag (although one of the rooms, the appropriately named “City of Shadows” killed off the WiFi and no tweets were generally sent in those discussions).

#needles – how do we build tools to find new science in our big data? Possibly using learning and neural networks to look for clusters (because we’d have alot of outliers) in the data as well as clusters in the errors. There’s a skill sets for these neural networks though that we don’t have as a community – how get that knowledge available? Talked about citizen science too and also visualisation. Are today’s visualisation tools up to the task? Bring the code to the data rather than the data to the code?

#disconnect -how to engage with people who don’t have internet or away from tools that we’re used to. Tools delivered on a tablet to people in disconnected spaces. Is it cost effective to focus on physical tools that caa be delivered to teach astronomy or deliver hardware as a one time cost that can be slowly updated? How do we culturally connect with different groups though? We’re not aware of how some communities view astronomers so we need to interact with community leaders.

#coolcode – share ideas of how to make user environments more appealing, efficient and pleasant – using different shells etc, colour schemes, window management, text editors like sublime, f.lux to change your screen brightness for coding late at night and using the screen command for remote commands.

#dataverse – barrier to hosting data is mapping from personal machine to standard architecture. How much time would people be willing to spend mapping your dataset to a standardise your dataset? Most people said about a day whereas big data surveys generally spend a month on this. Several people mentioned having a python code that would map this for you – but who would actually write this? Big part of the discussion today.

#astroplan – tutorial in the first part of our discussion. Discussed what else wanted to see astroplan do – alot of input here. What should the identity of astroplan be? Outreach to amateur astronomers or more for research side and robotic queue scheduling?  So how do we advertise this and communicate this effectively?

#codecredit – how do we get credit for the “non-science” jobs that we do? Especially when applying for jobs. Dind’t come up with a solution but came up with some action points. Websites that give information about how to enhance your skills to a hiring committee, how to put your code on ASCL and how to do this. Update this information on AstroBetter and possibly get a post out to Astrobites to get this information out to under- and post-graduates. Change the culture slowly.

#astrogui – talked about imoportance of visualisation of astro data and particularly the tools we have. Discussed the pros and cons of a native and a web-based application. Institutional history of cutting funding for development of these tools and that’s something as a community that we can address. We could write a white paper about the most perfect visualisation for astronomical data as a goal that we can work towards as a community. Has to be done within the community rather than publication of individual tools that don’t get used.

#2py3py – how horrific will the conversion between Python 2 to Python 3? Apparently not that bad there’s some code that’s been tweeted out that you can add to the top of your current Python 2 code to prepare for this change (e.g. the print_function). We also looked at virtual environments using different versions of python to test your code. The one downfall is legacy code – dealing wiht that might be an issue.

#friendlyVO – how do I make my data VO compliant? We had a summary of all the things we needed to do this and actually it’s not as hard as you might think. This discussion developed into a hack idea where we make a webform to upload data, fill in fields and would do it all for you.

#dotdiv – discussed the issues facing open source projects not being diverse or representative of the community as a whole. Some of the possible reasons raised were stereotype threats, imposter syndrome and a fear of doing things in the public domain.  We had a really good discussion and concrete ideas came out of it: direct outreach to specific groups, bridging programs, mentorship of beginners, promoting diversity in very obvious places on the project and providing examples of current people in minority groups in the tutorials etc. Let’s make open source development diversity friendly!

#recohack – got people’s thoughts on how we get recognition for #dotastro hacks themselves and by extension recognition as the tool builders. It kick started a broader discussion on impact and how we show the impact of a .Astronomy conference to showcase to the wider community. An idea was to showcase the most widely used .Astro hacks e.g. ArXiver, astrobites etc. which people know and love but there’s a disconnect there knowing that they are a .Astro hack. Also there’s no list of previous hacks anywhere. Also discussed how the conference and the people who attend are perceived? A waste of time? Or a really great collective that build awesome tools?

#futurepub – what will the journal of the future look like? What do we want our reading experience to be? Living documents that update with version control rather than static PDFs. Interactive plots & tables, possibly 3D with hover over  figures that highlight relevant text, hover references that pop up windows showcasing ArXiver style snippets of a paper etc. Who’s responsibility is this though? The community by doing little hacks to make this all happen? Or the journals to actually hire people to do it? Possibly as a community we can hack something together to showcase what we want future journals to look like and then hand over that responsibility of making it happen to the journal itself.

 

Phew! That was one exciting and incredibly awesome day. I hope you enjoyed following along live as much as I enjoyed writing it live! Any comments let us know below or tweet with the #dotastro hashtag to let us know thoughts/opinions/musings on any of the things discussed today. See you all tomorrow for our wonderful hack day! .Astro Day 1 over and out. 

About Becky Smethurst

Becky is a PhD student in astrophysics working with the Galaxy Zoo team in Oxford on the link between morphology and quenching. Generally happy-go-lucky and overly enthusiastic about most everything.

More Posts (4)
]]> Live Blog: .Astro 7 Day Zero http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/11/live-blog-astro-7-day-zero/ Mon, 02 Nov 2015 22:47:33 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1617 This is a guest post by Steve Crawford (@astrocrawford), who will be live blogging Day Zero of .Astronomy 7.   

Welcome to Day Zero of .Astro 7!  The best place to start is  Day Zero wiki and guide.  This is my first .Astronomy and I’ll try to keep a live blog of everything that is going on…or at least as fast as I can type.  Thanks to Amanda Bauer, Arna Karick, the LOC, and the .Astronomy 7 sponsors: NSW Department of Industry, Mozilla Science Lab, AAL, AAO, CASS, Swinburne, ICRAR/UWA, ANU/RSAA,CAASTRO, University of Sydney!

9:30 am:  Welcome by Amanda Bauer and Arna Karick.   The motivation for day zero is to provide a chance for people that may not have experienced  .Astronomy before or those who aren’t familiar with some of the tools a chance to become familiar with them.     Amanda also warned us to watch out for revelers from the Melbourne Cup — personally I think they should watch out for #dotastro revelers.

9:45: Sarah Kendrew is first up with an overview of .Astronomy.   This was all started by Robert Simpson to highlight how new web tools can be used for astronomy use (like galaxy zoo, twitter) and there has been very good overlap between the astronomy community and tech industry.   The conference is a mix of regular talks, unconference sessions, 1 day hack, and welcoming to astronomers and outsiders.   The unconference sessions are a great chance for open discussions which can be kicked off with just a few slides.   Hack days give a chance for people to get together and do things. Some examples of different hacks include chromoscope, optimize.js, D3PO, and ‘Don’t Call Me Colin.’  Positives outcomes of .Astronomy:  Giving a platform to showcase innovative ideas and skills, provides a place to learn and play (and recruit), and help build a strong tech-aware community for future science and public engagement.   Great chance to think, listen, talk, ask, learn, make, have fun! Tea Sets Wholesale Tea Sets Amber Jewelry Sleeping Bags

10:00 Arna Karick on “What makes a good hackathon?”    A hack is a small project that solves one problem, designed, and executed as quickly as possible, but it’s not just about coding.    Arna has 12 great tips to the hack day including love your neighbor (you don’t know what you might be able to help with), share your skills, be selfish, work with people you want or projects you want, be silly, and have fun.   The tool that we will be using for collaborating will be slack, which gives good client to message different teams and keep track of projects.

10:45 Becky Smethurst on “ipython notebooks.”  The  ipython notebook provides a great and interactive way to integrate code and writing.  Fantastic for using for tutorials, course notes, keeping track of the work that you have done, teaching people to code, and sharing your results.   It is very helpful for making your results reproducible.   Once installed, the ipython notebook can easily be started in a browser by typing `ipython notebook` on a command line.    The notebook is broken into different blocks that can be used for text (raw or markup)  or code, and each block can be run individual (they do use what was run in previous blocks).   In addition to code and text, there are also widgets that allow people to build interactive plots in the ipython notebook.   An example of an ipython notebook is the quantity tutorial for astropy, and there is also good integration of notebooks into github (so easy to collaborate with notebooks). Now, the kernals are language agnostic so ruby, perl, and julia also work in the notebooks.

11:15 Danny Vohl on ‘Relational Databases and SQL‘: “A relational database is a digital representation of a relational model of data (how information is linked together).”   A number of different databases are used in astronomy included sqlite,  MySQL , or PostgreSQL.    For the most part, the SQL language uses a set of commands to interact with the database and create tables, insert objects, and query results.  Danny’s tutorial uses sqlite and sqlitebrowser to create a simple database with galaxy morphologies.    For a more advance use of a databases, see for example the  SDSS SkyServer’s SQL Search.

12:10 Simon Mutch on ‘Version Control.’   Some examples of version control includes time machine, dropbox, google documents, and wikis.   Reasons to use version control include provenance,  minimize duplications, reproducibility (example from the arXiv), and collaboration.   Simon’s tutorial gives an introduction to git — a version control software that is available via the command line as well as being integrated into a number of different tools.   Git is not centralized (like svn for example), but each local repository keeps its own copy.  Many projects also store and maintain a version of their repository on online resources like github and bitbucket.   There are many online tutorials for using git and github along with how different projects use it.

1:45 Aaron Robotham on ‘R and Shiny by RStudio.’   R is an open source language based on the proprietary stats language S, which is a high level, interpretive language that has C/Fortran  under the bonnet.    Shiny is a binding for R for building web applications.    Aaron’s tutorial involves RStudio, an IDE (integrated development environment) for R.   With Shiny and R, it is relatively easy to create web based plots with interactive widgets.  There are several ways to share your app including local hosting, shinyapps.io, and github.   An example of a site using R and Shiny is cosmocalc, and there is a full gallery of examples on the Shiny website.    Also, a published example by Robotham & Obreschkow (2015) is hyperfit.

2:20 Demitri Muna on ‘HTML & Javascript.’   Javascript is a interpretive computer language that allows interaction without returning to a server and can be run in a browser or stand alone.  For his tutorial, Demitri will be using the browser to type javascript commands directly the console.   All of the variables in javascript are objects and can use a specific notation for defining these objects, which has been adopted as the format for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).   A potential pitfall is javascript type coercion:  it will silently convert data types so be careful when declaring and combining variables.  When building an html page, we can include javascript inline or as a separate file.   As such, it becomes part of the DOM (Document Object Model), which is just a hierarchical tree of all the elements that make up an html page.  In addition, javascript can be used to trigger events and create new elements in your html pages.   There are many useful online tools and libraries for javascript including JQuery, StackOverFlow/Google, and Emscripten.

3:00 Jennifer Piscionere on ‘This Is Not An Introduction to d3.js‘.  This Is An Introduction to Seeing Something That Looks Cool on the Internet and Ripping it Off.   You’ve Already Done Koalas to the Max Right?  Make your own codeflower.   First example: FORCE COLLAPSE.  Why does my flower still not work?  Why We Used Firefox to Run Things Locally?  Does Everybody’s Flower Work? (In honor of this talk, I’ve ripped off all the sentences from Jennifer’s great talk, but please see the linked tutorial to set up your first d3 plot.)

4:00 Thomas Boch on  ‘Integrating Aladin Lite into a webpages.’  Aladin Lite is a lightweight version of Aladin that works in the browser and useful for visualizing a region of the sky.  You can display different surveys, overall markers, display simbad and vizier data, footprints, and visual EPO images.  It uses HiPS and IVOA standards.   The Aladin Lite can easily be embedded in a web page with a few lines of code.  For example, I’ve just embedded one below by copying and pasting the text from the tutorial.

Trifid interactive map




4:40 Thomas Robitaille on ‘ Accessing remote resources from Python.’ There are a number of python resources for accessing html resources, but the built-in library,  urlib, is not very user friendly, but there is another library requests (http for humans), which is much easier to use.   The output from requests can then be passed on to other libraries to help parse the output like BeautifulSoup and json libraries.   There are other web sources that already have their own specialized libraries for accessing their pages like  PyGithub, Twitter, and ads.    In addition, python can be used to build websites and run servers using tools such as  Django and Flask and running on services such as Heroku.

5:30 And that’s Day Zero!   Thanks so much to the Amanda Bauer, Vanessa Moss, Arna Karick, James Allen, and Rob Hollow for organizing today.

About Amanda Bauer

Research Astronomer and Outreach Officer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | More Posts (3)
]]> .Astronomy7: Countdown to Day Zero http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/09/countdown-to-day-zero/ Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:06:03 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1494 At this year’s .Astronomy 7 conference, we’ll be running a pre-conference training day (‘Day Zero’) to showcase previous Hack Day projects and to introduce some of the tools participants have found most useful for their Hack Day experience and general work flow. Day Zero is optional, but we encourage everyone to attend, because Day Zero is about sharing skills, ideas, and lessons learned from previous .Astronomy participation and continuing professional development. During Day Zero we will run a number of short tutorials – disguised as one giant hack – to help make all participants feel more confident about jumping into the hacking arena.

Why is Day Zero important?

Traditional astronomy conferences usually focus on a specific subdomain and are primarily used as a forum for researchers to present rigorous scientific outcomes, to network for the next job, seek the best future hire, and/or visit with old colleagues and friends. Rarely do researchers get to create innovative projects in collaboration with non-astronomy researchers, data scientists, freelance/tech-industry software developers, education professionals, and science communicators, or attend hackathons.  The .Astronomy conferences offer a playground for astronomy that is more specific than a general hack day, but more dynamic than a normal scientific astronomy meeting.

We aim to introduce a range of skills that will not only be useful for managing larger data sets coming online in the near future, but also in a context of professions other than the traditional academic astronomy career. The rise of fellowship programs, for example the Insight Data Fellows and Science to Data Science programs can offer a variety of careers options for trained astronomy professionals.  Skilled data scientists are in great demand in the worldwide job market and researchers with analytical backgrounds are being offered jobs in leading tech-companies. We hope to offer astronomers access a broader skillset and the opportunity to learn how to work collaboratively on hack-like projects.

Over the past six years the cumulative .Astronomy community has grown to become a connected group of people contributing uniquely to professional astronomy, international science education, and general science awareness among the public.  Day Zero is for sharing experiences and lessons from the past and present in order to build interesting and better tools for the future in all these arenas.

The idea for Day Zero is to teach various tools by treating them as steps in one big hack (perhaps). For example we might want to start by data-mining the the social web (for example scraping the #dotastro Twitter feed), then  populate a database hosted on a droplet server (DevOps: SQL, VMs), then  create a word association visualisation using D3js (Javascript, HTML, CSS) and finally, document everything in an IPython Notebook or on blog (either on GitHub or hosted with the database). Or we may take the more traditional approach of example based tutorials. Personally, I’m excited about learning new data visualisation tools, for example learning how to integrate tools like Aladin Lite into a research webpage, and learning about APIs and data archives.

This year we are also creating an official .Astronomy7 Day Zero Guide for conference participants. The guide will contain details about all previous .Astronomy Hack Day projects as well as information about our favourite web tools (and installation notes) and code repositories. We intend to make the Day Zero Guide available to the wider astronomy community  as a permanent resource for everyday research.

We are very excited about bringing Day Zero to .Astronomy and plan to make it just as fun and innovative as the rest of the conference.

Watch this space…

About Arna Karick

e-Research Consultant at Swinburne University and astronomer by trade. Works on projects that address issues around data-intensive research ("big data") projects. Occasionally writes data management policies and implements procedures and solutions. Organiser of things like Swinburne Hacker Within and Random Hacks of Kindness.

Web | Twitter | More Posts (1)
]]> Join us for .Astronomy 7 in Sydney http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/05/join-us-for-astronomy-7-in-sydney/ Mon, 18 May 2015 05:59:04 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1453

We’re happy to announce that .Astronomy 7 will be held in Sydney, Australia November 3-6th 2015. This marks the first ever .Astronomy held in the Southern Hemisphere – which is great because the night sky can feel like an exciting new Universe!

Information is available at http://dotastronomy.com/seven/, which we will continue to update as details are confirmed in the coming weeks.

As usual we will try to put together a great meeting, and will use your sign-up forms (link below) to bring together people with a mix of skills, expertise, and backgrounds. We aim to host approximately 50 attendees for a three-ish-day conference all about astronomy online!

The event will include a series of talks, multiple unconference sessions, and a full day hacking on awesome, innovative projects. For the first time, we will also offer an optional .Astronomy Day 0 – an opportunity for people to hear about previous Hack Day projects and the tools most frequently used to make them.

The sign up form asks what you would like to bring to .Astronomy and talk about, but also what you’d like hear from others. So feel free to nominate anyone and anything you think is interesting and useful in this part of the form. We’d like to particularly encourage women and minorities to sign up – and also people based in Australia or this general region of the world. Tea Sets Wholesale Tea Sets Amber Jewelry Sleeping Bags

Please register your interest by June 26th: http://tinyurl.com/dotastro7

Please share the links far and wide – and maybe we’ll see you in Sydney.

About Amanda Bauer

Research Astronomer and Outreach Officer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | More Posts (3)
]]> Coming Up Next http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2015/03/coming-up-next/ Tue, 03 Mar 2015 09:54:50 +0000 http://dotastronomy.com/?p=1360 .Astronomy has gone from strength to strength in the last few years. At the most recent event I invited several non-astronomers along, so to see if they’d be interested in running .Ecology, .Maths, .BioMed, and others. The answers is that yes: they’d love to and plans have begun taking shape already.

At the same time, big changes have been happening for me. I’m leaving my current role at the Zooniverse to work at Google. Since I’ll no longer be an academic astronomer, it seems like it is time to change the way .Astronomy works in order to ensure it keeps going and stays connected to the astronomy community.

For .Astronomy 7 and 8, I will not be running the show. I’ll still be assisting in their organisation, but for these events, I will be in the background. Myself and the #dotastro ‘braintrust’ will remain essential to keeping a continuity to the whole series of events, but these events will be directed by trusted friends and .Astronomy alumni Amanda Bauer (AAO) and Rebecca Smethurst (Oxford).

.Astronomy 7 will be held later this year, in Sydney, directed by Amanda Bauer. This will be our first meeting held in Australia, potentially opening up participation to a whole new crowd.

.Astronomy 8 will be held 21st-23rd June 2016, in Oxford, directed by Rebecca Smethurst. This marks our (triumphant!) return to UK. Tea Sets Wholesale Tea Sets Amber Jewelry Sleeping Bags

sydney oxford

Both conferences will still be run in much the same way as previous meetings, with a sign-up form for expression of interest, and a limit number of participants being selected to attend. They will still have talks, unconference sessions, and a hack day. They may also try new things out – as we have always done at .Astronomy. They’re never all the same.

Amanda and Becky will be working together to make sure these events also keep continuity too. It’s going to be a lot of fun, and I’m psyched to see how these events turn out. Hopefully I can even attend them. It’s amazing to think that .Astronomy is already arranging it’s eighth event!

As these events are going on, I also expect to see .Ecology, .BioMed, and other potential new events try out their first meeting. I’m working with those people too, and hopefully we can have some crossover between the organiser and attendee lists to keep the spirit of .Astronomy going into these new areas.

To aid all of this, I’ll be creating a new umbrella site to house all these events and details so they can live together online. More details about specific events will follow, such as sign-up forms and venue details.

This is going to be fun!

About Robert Simpson

Postdoc at the University of Oxford, working for the Zooniverse. Creator of .Astronomy.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | More Posts (24)
]]>