December 04, 2015

Stuart Mumford on SunPy

40 minutes

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Summary

What is Solar Physics? How does it differ from AstroPhysics? What does this all have to do with Python? In this episode we answer all of those questions when we interview Stuart Mumford about his work on SunPy. So put on your sunglasses and learn about how to use Python to decipher the secrets of our closest star.

Brief Introduction

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We are recording today on November 17th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti

Today we are interviewing Stuart Mumford about SunPy

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Interview with Stuart Mumford

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris

Can you explain what the research and applications of solar physics are and how SunPy facilitates those activities? – Tobias

What was your inspiration for the SunPy project and what are you using it for in your research? – Tobias

Can you tell us what SunPy’s map and light curve classes are and how they might be used? – Chris

Are there any considerations that you need to be aware of when writing software libraries for practitioners of the hard sciences that would be different if the target audience were software engineers? – Tobias

Can SunPy consume data directly from telescopes and other observational apparatus? – Chris

I noticed on the project site that SunPy leverages AstroPy internally. Can you describe the relationship between the two projects and why someone might want to use SunPy in place of or in addition to AstroPy? – Tobias

Looking at the documentation I got the impression that there is a fair amount of visual representation of data for analysis. Can you describe some of the challenges that has posed? Is there integrated support for project Jupyter and are there other graphical environments that SunPy supports? – Tobias

What are some of the most interesting applications that SunPy has been used for? – Chris

Picks

Tobias

Elm

Avro

Common Sense Media

Chris

Massdrop

21st Amendment Fireside Chat

Extra Creditz

Stuart

Live ISS Stream with space-to-ground radio

Live ISS HD video stream 24/7

Calf Studio – Live Audio Processing

Keep In Touch

Twitter(@sunpyproject)

SunPy.org

GitHub

IRC

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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