[AstroPy] ESA Summer of Code in Space 2013

Thu Jun 20 17:24:14 EDT 2013

On 20-06-2013 18:27, Erik Tollerud wrote:
> I want to issue a generic plea on this issue: lets do our best to join
> forces.
I think everyone has agreed that the specutils should be an affiliated 
package, resting as heavily as possible on astropy core.

> There are already a number of tools that do part of spectrum
> plotting and line-fitting, and if we'd all work together, with less
> effort we'd have a tool that does all of those and more.   That's the
> main point of Astropy, after all: encouraging collobaration on and
> re-use of python tools for astronomy.  I'm partly guilty here, as I
> have a similar fitting tool in astropysics -
> http://pythonhosted.org/Astropysics/gui/spylot.html, but I'd rather
> encourage people to use a tool that we can all get behind. I'll  call
> this the "Astropy spirit" :)
I have tried spylot myself and liked it, but it didn't match my needs 
and I found it easier to code my own thing than modify yours, which I 
actually considered. But I think that the idea has resonated so well is 
exactly that many of us have made an effort to create something, but 
kinda-sorta only made it halfway to something generally usable. That 
gives us a lot of design ideas floating around and a lot of coding and 
designing experience to exchange, but I believe the wise thing to do 
would be to build something simple but modular and extensible that 
integrates well with and makes strong use of astropy core. So I believe 
we are actually on the same page here.

> That said, I see the virtue of designing a new tool (ideally an
> astropy affiliated package) to combine the shared wisdom (perhaps with
> SOCIS, if it goes through). But the *worst* thing to have happen is to
> have the other efforts continue in parallel, with everyone designing
> similar but slightly incompatible tools.
We shall not disagree about that point, either!

> Along similar lines, Emil and Adam (although I think Adam already
> knows about it), I'd *strongly* encourage you to take a look at the
> astropy modeling framework
> (http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/modeling/index.html) - this will be
> in the next major release, and I'd hate to see you re-implementing all
> of that in an incompatible way. Or, if you don't like something about
> how that works for your needs, please help us make it better!

I am more discussing design and not going to be much of a coding work 
horse, as my summer and fall is quite swamped - but again, I completely 
agree and it is also my impression that this was the general consensus 
between anyone who's shown interest in the project.

I am, however, going to continue working on my own personal app, since 
it is highly specialized and I am tayloring it for a specific science 
project and I think chances are low that astropy will be usable for that 
within the time frame I need. But while writing it, there are also some 
more common functionality that I have written into it that could 
possibly be useful for an astropy affiliated package - e.g. a Traits GUI 
for interactively building compound lie profiles.

Cheers,
Emil

> On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Slavin, Jonathan
> <jslavin at cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Hi Adam,
>>
>> I have used pyspeckit.  There are parts of it that are very useful, but I
>> found overall that it didn't do what I wanted.  For example, I wanted to
>> give it my spectrum, have it display it, allow me to manually (in the gui)
>> place my guesses for line centers (would probably need guesses for widths as
>> well) and then fit the lines (and continuum) and return the fitted line
>> centers, widths, and amplitudes, etc. along with error estimates.  It's been
>> a while now since I used it, but as I recall, pyspeckit did not do all of
>> those things.  There may have been other reasons as well, but in the end I
>> wrote my own fitting routines to work with the data.  Am I wrong about the
>> capabilities of pyspeckit?
>>
>> Jon
>> ________________________________________________________
>> Jonathan D. Slavin                 Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
>> jslavin at cfa.harvard.edu       60 Garden Street, MS 83
>> phone: (617) 496-7981       Cambridge, MA 02138-1516
>> fax: (617) 496-7577            USA
>> ________________________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 5:21 PM, <astropy-request at scipy.org> wrote:
>>> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:32:31 -0700 (PDT)
>>> From: Adam Ginsburg <keflavich at gmail.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [AstroPy] ESA Summer of Code in Space 2013
>>> To: astropy-dev at googlegroups.com
>>> Cc: astropy at scipy.org
>>> Message-ID: <44536fa7-b34e-4f05-941b-2cc05535bcc5 at googlegroups.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>>
>>>
>>> Emil and Jon - there is a package that fits exactly those requirements,
>>> called pyspeckit:
>>> pyspeckit.bitbucket.org
>>>
>>> One of my major goals over the next year is to incorporate it into astropy
>>> bit by bit, i.e. make it work with astropy.models, astropy.units, and
>>> specutils.  Only a little progress in that direction has been made (in
>>> part
>>> because my coding efforts have been focused more on astroquery).
>>>
>>> Emil - there is a scipy-dependent voigt profile implemented in pyspeckit.
>>>   You can check that it agrees with yours:
>>>
>>> http://pyspeckit.bitbucket.org/html/sphinx/models.html#pyspeckit.spectrum.models.inherited_voigtfitter.voigt
>>>
>>> I'm bringing this up on this particular thread because I had considered
>>> submitting pyspeckit as a SOCIS project, but I think focusing on specutils
>>> instead will be better for the community.  Nonetheless, there are some
>>> specific project ideas in place that may help support the case for a
>>> student working on specutils via SOCIS:
>>> pyspeckit.bitbucket.org/html/sphinx/projects.html
>>>
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