[AstroPy] Summer scholar

[Wolfgang Kerzendorf]

  Hi,

So I think I might have to clarify the summer-scholar idea a little. 
When they arrive these students are often no or only novice programmers. 
They also often come from a Windows background  and will spend two weeks 
or so getting used to the command-line. I understand that a wavelet 
analysis tool would be very useful for many astronomers, but I think far 
too complex for such a summer-scholarship. Maybe a good idea for a 
Google Summer of Code project.


It is my belief that we need a project with phases. So that depending on 
the students skill, there's a finishing line.  The student also needs a 
clear idea of the project path, which could be outlined in a wiki style 
document.
The idea that Rene suggested with sextractor got me thinking.

Phase I:
We could have a function that finds stars in an image. It would not do 
photometry, but just find stars. We could model what sextractor does in 
this respect closely.  This would also have nice byproducts like a 
background fitting routine.

Phase II:
If the student manages to do the star finding, we can try to identify 
stars in the image. We can use the Groth/Stetson algorithm using 
triangles: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986AJ.....91.1244G

Phase III:
If we get this far, we could try to fit a wcs to it, maybe. I think 
that's very ambitious and so I am pretty sure the student would not get 
that far.

So I think this is doable, but I'm not sure. What are people's thoughts 
on this?
Cheers
     Wolfgang

On 31/07/10 3:44 AM, Rene Breton wrote:
> Hi Wolfgang,
>
> Coord base class might be interesting, though I'm not entirely sure to
> know what you have in mind. Is it stuff like planar projections,
> precession, coordinate transformations, etc.? Obviously, if that's
> something that you need and want to see, I'd say go for it.
>
> Something that I see as relatively important, in the view of what IDL's
> astrolib does, are tools to deal with photometry and spectroscopy. I
> know that some people are fans of sextractor. I don't know to what
> extent it is good and whether or not we should put efforts somewhere
> else but it's definitely worth thinking. PSF photometry, both from an
> analytical (arbitrary) function and from a template array, would be very
> appealing, I think. Same kind of thinking should go toward spectroscopy.
>
>
> Rene
>
>
> On 10-07-30 12:16 AM, Wolfgang Kerzendorf wrote:
>>     Dear all,
>>
>> Here at Mt. Stromlo Observatory we will have summer scholars in November
>> - February. There was a recent call for ideas for ~8 week summer
>> projects. I can definitley co-supervise as this will all happen at
>> Stromlo, but would need help with fleshing out an idea. Is there
>> something we can offer for a physics undergrad to code for 8 weeks.
>> Maybe build a coord base class? Is that too complex? Other ideas? Maybe
>> we should also think about getting people in the next GSoC round?
>> What are people's feeling on this?
>>
>> Cheers
>>      Wolfgang
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