SunPy Awarded NASA Grant

2021-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

As part of the NASA “Open Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries” program, the SunPy proposal “Strengthening the Foundations of the SunPy Ecosystem” has been funded for the next three years.

This proposal was submitted in January 2021, and sought funding for both the core sunpy package and wider goals of the project. After early community input was collected, Albert Shih led the proposal itself, with NASA GSFC as the primary institution. The proposed effort focuses on three main areas:

Improving the technical infrastructure.

This focuses on the tools that the wider project needs to scale up as we adopt more coordinated and affiliated packages. To support multiple active projects with a common development workflow, more tooling and infrastructure is needed, both for maintainers of existing packages and developers new to writing affiliated packages. As part of this work templates for setting up new packages will be improved, documentation will be written, and new automation and monitoring bots will be developed to ease the burden on the SunPy maintainers.
Augmenting science-enabling functionality.

This section aims to improve the tools provided by the core package to better support future challenges in solar physics data. The two main components of this are supporting multi-point observations with improvements to the sunpy.coordinates package, and improving the support for very large datasets in sunpy and sponsored packages by leveraging the scaling and parallelism tools available from Dask.
Providing training and outreach

This section will improve example galleries across both sunpy core and affiliated packages, develop training materials for solar physics graduate students, and perform outreach activities with instrument teams and package developers.

What will the money pay for?

The money awarded to this proposal will pay for:

Albert Shih will manage the project and augment parts of sunpy.coordinates.
Stuart Mumford will work on infrastructure for all sponsored and affiliated packages as discussed in sunpy/sunpy-project#2.
Will Barnes will work on the training/outreach and large-dataset-support components of the project.

Finally

This is a major milestone for SunPy - it is the first significant amount of funding dedicated to directly working on the long term sustainability of the project. This funding will help to significantly grow SunPy, both the core package and the ecosystem of associated packages.

October Release Announcements

2021-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Today we have a quadruple release announcement for you! It’s been a very busy week in SunPy land getting both the core and ndcube releases over the line; I hope you enjoy them!

sunpy 3.1

The next scheduled release of the sunpy core package actually comes a week early according to our release calendar, but we couldn’t resist bringing you this end of month release party.

The 3.1 release contains many new features and improvements, having merged 145 pull requests from 16 people including 8 new contributors.

Some of the highlights from the What’s New in SunPy 3.1? page are:

Increased in-situ data support
A new limb drawing function
A new WISPR map source
Propagating solar-surface coordinates in time
Convenient reprojection of maps
JSOC keyword filtering with Fido
Arithmetic operations with maps

My personal favourites being the new limb drawing function and the reproject_to method on all maps.

ndcube 2.0

Even more excitingly, for me personally, is the long awaited 2.0 release of ndcube.

ndcube is the sunpy sponsored package for working with multi-dimensional data with an associated WCS object. For an introduction to ndcube and motivation for the 2.0 rework see An introduction to ndcube.

We started working on ndcube 2.0 back in 2019 when we had Yash Sharma do the initial work of porting the code base to use the APE 14 APIs as his Google Summer of Code project. Little did any of us think that it would take over two years from that point to hit the final release.

The road to ndcube 2.0 has been long and arduous; all involved have put in a lot of work and what we have made is something that I am personally very proud of. ndcube 2.0 would not have happened without Dan Ryan, who as the co-maintainer for ndcube has spent many hours on video calls with me designing APIs, and many more hours besides working out problems you would only encounter in one in a million WCS objects! I would also be remiss if I didn’t specifically thank the DKIST data center who have, by paying for my time, funded a lot of the development work on ndcube 2.0, even when the scope increased beyond their direct requirements.

I hope that many packages will start using ndcube 2.0 as the base for their code. There are already many who have helped to shape the release such as the DKIST User Tools, specutils and sunraster as well as others I know are in the works.

For all the gory details of the changes in ndcube 2.0 see the changelog.

pfsspy 1.0

The SunPy-affiliated potential field source surface extrapolation package pfsspy maintained by David Stansby has had a 1.0 release, which includes promises of API stability. You can read about all the changes in the changelog.

aiapy 0.6

The SunPy-affiliated aiapy package, which provides tools for working with SDO/AIA data and is maintained by the AIA instrument team, has a new 0.6 release which includes support for sunpy core 3.1. In addition to a number of bug fixes, v0.6 also includes the ability to calculate uncertainties on AIA images via the estimate_error function. A complete list of changes is available in the changelog.

Blog - Posted in 2021