Blog - Posted in 2015

SunPy Update - November 2015

2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Hello all,

Time for a quick rundown of October.

October News

Python 3 Port

One of the major features scheduled for the 0.7 release is Python 3 compatibility. To this end a subpackage by subpackage porting effort is underway. The master branch of SunPy will now install and import using Python 3.4 or 3.5 (3.3 is untested) and the map, data, util, cm, time, image, io and sun subpackages now have their tests passing. The next major effort is to port the large net submodule across. If anyone has any time to contribute to the effort, please drop in to IRC and find me (Cadair).

Astropy 1.1 Beta

Just a quick note to let you all know that the 1.1 release of Astropy is getting close. This release contains a couple of cool things for SunPy, as well as some improvements to coordinates which will make things easier for SunPy coordinates, it contains an implementation of astropy table with an index column, which makes it possible to store timeseries in astropy tables.

Coming up in November

Weekly developer meetings.

Weekly Developer Discussions

The weekly meetings will be continuing this month, they are now at 1700UTC each week, and will be for the next ~6 months. We are using Google Hangouts and you can be notified of them by following our Google+ page (normally the join link is posted in IRC once the meeting has started). These meetings are also recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so you can catch up even if you can not attend in person.

Links to November’s meetings are below:

Meeting on 2/11
Meeting on 9/11
Meeting on 16/11
Meeting on 23/11
Meeting on 30/11

Getting in touch

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone about our public communication methods. We have two mailing lists, SunPy and sunpy-dev, the main SunPy list is used for general questions and announcements, and the sunpy-dev list is used for developer discussion and organisational emails. We also have the IRC channel, which normally has someone hanging out in it, and is an excellent place to get some real-time help, or to just come for a chat. We also have our Google+ page and a Twitter account.

Happy Pythoning, Stuart

SunPy Update - October 2015

2015-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to keep people in the loop about what is happening in the SunPy project, so I thought I would start sending out monthy updates about things that have happened and things that are going to happen. This update might be a little longer than usual due to the fact it’s the first one, and I want to get everyone up to speed. Before I start I just wanted to introduce myself just in case any of you have had the fortune of not knowing. I am Stuart Mumford, I submitted my PhD thesis last week at the University of Sheffield. I am currently lead developer of the SunPy project (again) having taken over from Albert.

September News

SunPy 0.6.1

0.6.1 contained a few bug fixes, mainly to the new WCS implementation because it was not working correctly with old-style headers. For the release announcement see here

Summer Students

This year we were lucky enough to have three summer students, two through Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and one through ESAs Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS).

Rupak Kumar Das worked on ginga improvements for multi-dimensional data, for anyone who has worked on IRIS or ground-based data using the CRISPEX software, ginga now has some of the core features you might find useful. The main things that have been implemented are 2D slit support when drawing paths on the image, mouse over line profiles and saving of animations and data. This is on top of the existing features in ginga which make it an excellent graphical tool for viewing FITS files. You can check it out here:

Ankit Kumar worked on implementing support for more sources in the sunpy.lightcurve module, focusing on SEP instruments on SOHO and STEREO. He has been implementing downloaders and readers for these new data sources on top of the new downloader class which will be released in SunPy 0.7. His work is in PR #1476

Alex Hamilton, our SOCIS student, has implemented the first SunPy Affiliated Package, which is a framework for magnetic field extrapolations in Python. The package currently provides a simple potential field extrapolator and tools for visulaising the output using MayaVi. The goal of this project was to implement a base from which more extrapolation algorithms could be implemented or wrapped into Python. Finalisation work is still on going with more documentation and an example gallery to come, for more information checkout the repository here:

SunPy Board Meeting

The SunPy project is managed by the SunPy board, information on the structure of the SunPy project can be found in its founding document . The board holds roughly quarterly meetings and discusses the general direction of the project, sponsorship and other things, not normally, directly linked to library development.

The minutes of this meeting (and previous meetings) can be seen here.

The highlights are:

Kevin Reardon from the DKIST project has joined the board to further collaboration between DKIST and SunPy.
Stuart Mumford has been nominated as lead developer.
Future board meetings will be advertised on the SunPy lists and people are welcome to observe.

Coming up in October

Weekly Developer Discussions

These weekly meetings have been on hiatus recently as Albert and I have been busy and we were sharing reposnsibility for organising them. As I have now submitted my thesis, and therefore have marginally more time on my hands they will be resuming. These meetings take place at 1600UT (until UK daylight savings kicks in) on Mondays, currently we use Google Hangouts and you can be notified of them by following our Google+ page (normally the join link is posted in IRC once the meeting has started). These meetings are also recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so you can catch up even if you can not attend in person.

Links to Octobers meetings are below:

Meeting on 5/10
Meeting on 12/10
Meeting on 19/10
Meeting on 26/10

Merging in the new ‘FIDO’ Downloader

After the 0.6 release, it was decided that the focus of the next release (0.7) would be the Lightcurve module and the new downloader that was built to work with it. To this end the first priority at the moment is to get the unidown branch merged into SunPy master. For anyone who wishes to contribute testing this branch is an excellent place to start, the PR can be found here

Getting in touch

I hope this email wasn’t so long nobody made it to the end. I will try and keep future ones a little shorter.

Happy Pythoning, Stuart

SunPy 0.6.1 Released

2015-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Announcing the 0.6.1 “thesis submission” release of SunPy. This is a bug fix release and contains the following fixes to things that slipped past us into 0.6:

Fixed MapCube animations by working around a bug in Astropy’s ImageNormalize
SunPy can now be installed without having to install Astropy first.
MapCubes processed with coalignment.apply_shifts now have correct metadata.
Multiple fixes for WCS transformations, especially with solar-x, solar-y CTYPE headers.

This release is available through either conda or pip, you can update with either:

conda update sunpy

pip update sunpy

depending upon how you have sunpy installed.

Happy Pythoning, Stuart

SunPy 0.6 Released

2015-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

I am very happy to tell you that the long in the works 0.6.0 release of the SunPy library has arrived. This release has been ‘in the oven’ for well over a year, and is full of rather major changes.

The major changes in this release are:

Most functions throughout the SunPy code base now expect Astropy Quantity objects, and return Astropy Quantity objects.
Python 2.6 support has ended, we do not expect this release to work under Python 2.6.
Sample data has been removed from SunPy but helpers for downloading sample data have been added to sunpy.data.
TimeRange has a new property based API, e.g. start and end are now properties.
SunPy colormaps are now registered with matplotlib, allowing their use from imshow and similar functions after the import of sunpy.cm.
Solar rotation calculation functionality has been added, along with functionality to de-rotate MapCubes.

While there have been lots of changes, it is the move to Astropy Units throughout the code base that will require most users to update their code, if you wish to learn more about Astropy Units see: https://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/units/

You can install this release using either pip or conda. If you have a scientific python environment already configured, run:

pip install sunpy

or:

pip install --upgrade sunpy

if you have anaconda you need to add the sunpy and astropy channels to your conda config:

conda config --add channels sunpy --add channels astropy

and then run:

conda install sunpy

for more information about installing sunpy see our installation documentation: https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/tutorial/installation.html

This release consists of 1,341 commits from 29 different people and 13 new contributors!

The people who have contributed to this release are:

Stuart Mumford
Daniel Ryan
Steven Christe
Jack Ireland
Brigitta Sipocz *
Asish Panda
Andrew Inglis
Albert Y. Shih
Rishabh Sharma
David Perez-Suarez
Rajul Srivastava
Andrew Leonard
Ruben De Visscher *
Dumindu Buddhika *
Goran Cetusic *
Jongyeob Park *
ChloÃ© Guennou *
Ishtyaq Habib *
Nabil Freij
Simon Liedtke
Abigail Stevens *
Alex Hamilton *
Ambar Mehrotra *
Erik M. Bray *
Jaylen Wimbish *
Juan Camilo Buitrago-Casas *
Larry Manley
Norbert Gyenge
Rishabh Mishra *

Happy Pythoning, Stuart Mumford

Info for the SunPy Tutorial at the TESS 2015

2015-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome TESS <https://aas.org/meetings/tess2015/> attendees to the “Introduction to Solar Data Analysis in Python”!

Here are a list of various links and information for the tutorial:

The Introduction to SunPy (in the form of ipython notebooks)
The IRC chatroom <https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=sunpy>
SunPy Poster by Dan Ryan - Thursday 10 am 403.07 SunPy: Solar Physics in Python (link coming soon)
Anaconda Python Distribution - the only way to fly!
How to install SunPy with Anaconda.
The Sheffield University SunPy Workshop