Blog - Posted in 2016

SPD 2016

2016-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

You can find all of the material for the introductory sessions of scientific python and sunpy can be found here.

SunPy 0.7

2016-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

SunPy 0.7 has arrived! This release is a culmination of about 10 months of work from 27 different people. This release brings many changes, the highlights are:

Python 3.4 and 3.5 support. This is the first version of SunPy to support Python 3, we recommend that users start to consider moving to Python 3, please report any issues you may have.
New coordinate framework. The new sunpy.coordinates module provides a high-level interface to converting between different physical coordinate systems such as Helioprojective and Heliographic.
New draw_rectangle and draw_contours helpers for Map.
Support for masks in SunPy Map and MapCube.

For this version of SunPy we have started building our conda packages on the excellent conda forge service. This means you need to add the conda-forge channel to your conda installation. If you have never installed SunPy before we recommend you follow our installation instruction. If you are upgrading from a previous release run the following two commands if you installed via conda:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda upgrade sunpy

If you installed via pip then you can upgrade with:

pip install -U sunpy

The following excellent people contributed to SunPy 0.7 (a * indicates their first contribution):

Stuart Mumford
Pritish Chakraborty
Steven Christe
Jack Ireland
Brigitta Sipocz
David Perez-Suarez
Punyaslok Pattnaik *
Michael S Kirk *
Andrew Leonard
Alex Hamilton
Andrew Inglis
Daniel Ryan
Sally Dacie *
Sanskar Modi *
Albert Y. Shih
Erik M. Bray
Larry Manley
Priyank Lodha *
Nabil Freij
Ankit *
Igor Babuschkin *
Ole Streicher *
Simon Liedtke
Sudarshan Konge *
Tessa D. Wilkinson *
Thomas Robitaille
yasintoda *

Happy Pythoning!

First impressions from SunPy at Python in Astronomy 2016

2016-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Steven Christe (@ehsteve) and Stuart Mumford (@Cadair) got to attend the (great) Python in Astronomy conference which took place in Seattle Washington from 21-25th of March 2016.

An introduction to SunPy was presented by Steven and you can find the presentation (and citation) at Zenodo

Great discussions took place on future plans for NDData,a new Time Series object,in Astropy, among many others.

SunPy Update - March 2016

2016-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Hello all,

Once again I am a week late, but here is a quick recap.

February News

Unified Downloader aka Fido

We had a very successful sprint on the Unified downloader a couple of weeks ago, and progress is being made towards having it ready to be merged. The two main things that need to be completed now are adding extra tests of the clients through the Fido interface and improving the documentation.

We are maintaining a list of issues outstanding on the unidown branch here as always feel free to ask for advice if you would like to tackle any of them. Fido is a key feature of SunPy 0.7 and will permit the development of the LightCurve object.

Google Summer of Code

OpenAstronomy got accepted as a GSOC 2016 mentoring Organisation. This is a significant new development as it indidcates outside recognition of the maturity and quality of the efforts comprising Open Astronomy (SunPy’s previous GSOC students came via the Python Foundation as the mentoring Organisation). This is the first time in 4 years thathe GSOC Org application SunPy has put in (individually or as a team) has been accepted! What this means for SunPy is that we will get some money per student from Google. For more information on GSOC see the OpenAstronomy website, and it’s not too late to submit project ideas.

Coming up in March

Python in Astronomy 2016

The Python in Astronomy conference is running between the 21st and the 25th of March at the e-Science Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. There will a strong SunPy contingent attending, keep your eyes open on social media and on the internet for talks and materials from the conference. There will be no meeting on the 21st March due to this conference.

Weekly Developer Discussions

The weekly meetings will be continuing this month, they are at 1700UTC each week. 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 coming meetings are below:

Meeting on 7/3
Meeting on 14/3
21/3 There will be no meeting this week due to Python in Astronomy 2016.
Meeting on 28/3

Reviewing Pull Requests

As always, reviews on pull requests are always welcome, you don’t have to have merge permissions or anything other than a GitHub account to review PRs. You can find a list of all the PRs that need reviewing here.

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 (#SunPy on Freenode), 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 - February 2016

2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hello all,

Sorry for the delay to the January update, but it is here at last.

There has been quite a lot going on in the six weeks since the last update, thanks to David for collating most of this news.

January and February News

SunPy

SunPy is using now the latest version of astropy-helpers (v1.1.1) and astropy’s ci-helpers which eases the maintenance of the package and the tests running.

Few new “badges” has been added now to the readme file in the repository, these badges show the status of the repository, like number of downloads, whether the development version is passing all its tests or not (via Travis and appveyor ), the amount of code tested, two quality measurements and one that shows the impact in academia. All these are little helpers to keep an eye on the quality and usage of our beloved project.

One of the important tests problem solved in this last month has been the figures tests. Some visualisation is being tested for every new contribution people submit - as with any other tests - and if they differ the test suite tells us something has changed (or is broken). The figures tested are in the new sunpy-figure-test repository. There you can see the figures and compare them with the previous versions - including the environment used to create them.

OpenAstronomy workshop

January started with a 5-day workshop which extended a 2-day software-carpentry bootcamp with an introduction to Astropy and SunPy. Read more about the success of the workshop in the openastronomy blog. This workshop will be repeated in the future, but if you want to organise one don’t hesitate to contact us about it.

Coming up

Google Summer of Code

SunPy is joining many other teams to apply together under the OpenAstronomy umbrella to Google Summer of code. If you want to mentor or help mentoring one of the summer projects already proposed contact us. If you have some ideas or see that there’s something missing in SunPy… tell us and we can create a project plan for that.

If you are a candidate student, please, don’t wait till the last week to get in touch. Get yourself known in the IRC and mailing list… we don’t have all the projects ready yet but they will be soon. Don’t forget that a contribution before applying is compulsory to being accepted.

Weekly Developer Discussions

Links to coming meetings can are below:

Meeting on 15/2
Meeting on 22/2
Meeting on 29/2

Reviewing Pull Requests

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 (#SunPy on Freenode), 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, David and Stuart

SunPy Update - January 2016

2016-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hello all,

Sorry for the lack of a December update, the news for December can be summed up as: “Stuart passed his Viva with minor corrections.”

Seeing how we are now in 2016 and the original milestone for 0.7 is the end of January, I hope that many people have made “contribute to SunPy” a new years resolution!! Before we can release 0.7 we need a working Python 3 port, and the unidown branch merged, and the Lightcurve factory implemented.

December News

Astropy 1.1

Astropy 1.1 has been released, so you should upgrade your Astropy! Also astropy_helpers 1.1 has been released and David has opened PR #1627 to update the version in SunPy with the new release, which should hopefully fix issues we were having with sphinx and doctests on Travis.

Coming up in January

OpenAstronomy SunPy and Astropy Workshop

On 11th to 15th of January at the University of Sheffield there will be a 5 day workshop, with the first two days being a two day Software Carpentry workshop, teaching bash, git and Python. While the rest of the week covers more SunPy and Astropy specific topics. More information can be found on the website.

There are still places available, you can register here.

Weekly Developer Discussions

The weekly meetings will be continuing this month, they are at 1600UTC each week. 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 4/1
Meeting on 11/1
Meeting on 18/1
Meeting on 25/1

Reviewing Pull Requests

Another easy way to get involved is with labelling issues, if you are interested in doing this but don’t have permissions to label issues on GitHub, swing by the IRC channel and talk to me (Cadair). Issues that are not labelled can be found here

Summer of Code Project Ideas

As usual this year SunPy will be applying for the GSOC and SOCIS summer of code programs. As always, the most important part of these applications is having an interesting project ideas list and people willing to mentor students. If you have any interesting project ideas related to SunPy (they do not have to be on the SunPy code base), then please drop us a line on the mailing list, or edit this wiki page.

As we did last year we will be initially applying for GSOC under the OpenAstronomy banner, so suggestions of ways to improve that site, or general involvement with OpenAstronomy would be welcome.

Getting in touch

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone about our public communication methods. We have two mailing lists, SunPy and sunpy, 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