Python and the Sun

Transforming Space Science through Open-Source

whoami

  • Final-Year Undergrad, JIIT Noida
  • GSoC '23 Student @ OpenAstronomy
  • Helping maintain SunPy
  • Volunteer @ OSDC, FOSS United, and here!
  • Interested in Python, Scientific Software, Data and the Cloud

an outline

  • Python in Science, Astronomy
  • Python and Solar Physics, SunPy
  • Open-Science

Scientific Python

Python 🤝  Scientific Communities!

  • Accessible
  • Flexible
  • Open-Source
  • Actively Developed
  • Strong Community Support

Many Reasons Why

Python in Astronomy

  • Rapid adoption in the astronomy community
  • Advantages: ease of use, extensive libraries, strong community support
  • Shift from proprietary software to open-source solutions

The Astro-Python Ecosystem

  • AstroPy: Core package for astronomy
  • Astroquery: Accessing astronomical data from online sources
  • Stingray: Time series analysis and spectral-timing software
  • SunPy: Heliophysics / Solar Data Analysis
  • ...many more!

Open Science

  • the movement to make scientific research and its results accessible to all levels of society.
  • transparency, reproducibility, collaboration.

The Sun

best star ever 🌟

Why study the Sun?

🤔

The Sun powers life on Earth!

But the Sun is also a stormy place...

SDO/AIA

In a sky full of stars...

SDO/AIA

SDO/AIA

Coronal Mass Ejections

SolarSoft

  •  
  • Lots of pain-points: proprietary and closed development environment, difficult to get involved, lack of versioning, etc.

The SunPy Project

A community of scientists and software developers creating an ecosystem of Python packages for solar physics.

The SunPy core Package

Solar data analysis. This involves:

  • access data from different providers
  • read image and time series data
  • visualise, plot solar data
  • transform between commonly used coordinate systems
  • ...

Objective

To develop and facilitate a high-quality, easy-to-use, community-led, FOSS solar data analysis ecosystem based on the scientific Python environment.

SunPy Affiliate Projects

  • Sunkit-image: Advanced image processing for solar data
  • NDCube: Multi-dimensional data structures for scientific data
  • drms: Access to Stanford's Joint Science Operations Center data
  • ... many more

SunPy's Impact

  • Used in numerous scientific publications
  • Supports various solar missions and ground-based observatories
  • Enables efficient data analysis and visualization for researchers worldwide

A quick tour!

  • Units
  • Times
  • Coordinates
  • Maps
  • Timeseries

Units...

working with units

Times and TimeRanges

Acquiring Solar Data

  • Support for available data sources: VSO, HEK, JSOC...
  • Fido, SunPy's unified search interface

Acquiring Solar Data

very extensible!

Adding Sources

  • Just need to subclass existing BaseClients, map API's

Plotting a Solar Map

Working with Maps

Finding bright regions via ndimage

https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/generated/gallery/map

Getting Involved

  • Use it!
  • File bug reports
  • Contribute documentation
  • Contribute code
  • The Matrix chat: #sunpy:openastronomy.org
  • Weekly community calls

The FAIR Principles

  • Findable
  • Accessible
  • Interoperable
  • Reproducible

Open Science Practices

  • Open access
  • Open data
  • Open source

OSS in Open Science

  • Enabling reproducible research
  • Accelerating scientific progress through shared tools
  • Democratized access to advanced analytical capabilities

Many Initiatives that help further this goal

Challenges in Open Science

  • Balancing openness with data protection and proprietary periods
  • Ensuring long-term sustainability of open-source projects
  • Promoting open science practices in education and professional development

Relevant Links

  • https://github.com/sunpy/
  • https://docs.sunpy.org/
  • https://nasa.github.io/Transform-to-Open-Science/
  • https://openastronomy.org/
  • https://pyopensci.org/

Thanks!

in/akshit-tyagi42

exitflynn

these slides ^

flynnzler

@exitflynn@fosstodon.org

Made with Slides.com