Introduction to GSoC 2015

What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code is a really great opportunity for early-career astronomers to learn to code with forethought for open source projects that will actually get used by other astronomers — something we often aspire to do, but are rarely taught to do. To begin a GSoC project, you work one-on-one (or in my case, two-on-one) with mentors who are experienced open source developers to prepare a proposal for a software tool you would like to make with their help, including a detailed description of the project's deliverables and timeline.

In the astronomical world, one source of GSoC projects is astropy, our friendly neighborhood Pythonic astronomical Swiss-army knife. There are projects related to the active development on the "core" guts of astropy — like one proposed project by UW graduate student Patti Carroll — in addition to projects on affiliated packages which make use of astropy to do new things for more specific end-users than astropy core.

Your proposal gets written up in a wiki page on the astropy GitHub repository, where it can be revised with the help of your proposed mentors.

My GSoC2015 project: astroplan

My GSoC 2015 proposal is to help co-develop astroplan (heads up: as of posting in May 2015, this repo will be boring), an observation planning and scheduling tool for observational astronomers. This package will allow observers to enter a table of astronomical targets and a range of observing dates in order to retrieve (1) the sky-coordinates for their targets, (2) rise/set times, moon/sun separation angles, airmass ephemerides, and other essential positional criteria necessary for determining the observability of a target, and (3) a roughly optimized observing schedule for the list of targets. This project will take advantage of the already-developed infrastructure for these calculations in the coordinates, time, and table modules of astropy, plus Astroquery — an astropy-affiliated package. If you don't already know about these powerful tools, check them out!

I will be working with a great team of astroplanners including mentors: Eric Jeschke, Christoph Deil, Erik Tollerud and Adrian Price-Whelan, and co-developer Jazmin Berlanga Medina.

Call for input

Since we want astroplan to be useful and used by astronomers, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on what astroplan absolutely must do. If you think you might be an astroplan user one day, leave a comment below or on Twitter with your top-priority observation planning/scheduling features.

Post Zero: Syntax Highlighing in Blogger

Introductions

The 2015 Google Summer of Code is officially underway! I've met my mentors/teammates through a few very productive Google Hangouts with participating astronomers from Germany to Hawaii and it's almost time to get to work.

Before the blog posts start flowing about astronomy, astropy and observations, I'm going to make a meta blog post about making blog posts. I trolled the internet for a convenient way to blog via iPython notebooks – my preferred medium for coding, documentation and sharing – and found it to be extremely difficult. Some solutions exist but I couldn't get any of them working satisfactorily in a reasonable amount of time, so I'm sticking with simple Blogger posts in the hopes that I can spend the time that I would have spent wrestling with Nikola and Pelican writing useful blog posts instead.

In that spirit, I want to help propagate some useful instructions I used to set up my Blogger blog for writing posts about coding in Python. All of the credit for these tips goes to Mahesh Meniya via stackoverflow.

Setting up SyntaxHighlighter

If you need syntax highlighting in your Blogger blog, you should start on your Blogger homepage and click the drop down menu next to the "Go To Post List" button to reach your "Template" page. Click the "Edit HTML" button to get into the guts of your Blogger posts. 

Now on your screen you should see a whole lot of syntax-highlighted HTML code, which we're going to edit. Click in that code window and do Ctrl+F/Cmd+F to search for </b:skin>. You'll see that the code inside the b:skin tag is folded. Click the black arrow next to the b:skin tags to expand and see the code inside. Just before the </b:skin> tag, paste all of the text on this webpage.

Next use Find again to search for the </head> tag, above which you should paste the following:

For our final insertion, find the </body> tag, and place above it: 

<script language='javascript'>
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.BloggerMode();
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');
</script>

and you're good to go! Now create a post to test it out. In the new post, switch from Compose mode to HTML mode, and enter some code that you'd like to post, like this:

    <pre name="code" class="python">
    print("Hello world!")
    </pre>

and it will render like this:

print("Hello world!")

Great job! Now tell us about that code of yours.