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Ideas for student projects

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wkerzendorf edited this page Mar 25, 2013 · 10 revisions

This is a page to keep track of ideas of Astropy projects that could be done by students, and is for internal purposes only (it is not a list of officially offered projects).

Astropy developers, please add your ideas here.

  • Set up real life examples (e.g. reproduce some classic paper results using astropy).

  • Performance benchmarks for astropy with vbench. This is a project started by Wes McKinney and he uses it for pandas. Then Vlad Niculae applied it to scikit-learn and improved it, e.g. he added memory profiling. There are tons of things in astropy (coordinates, convolution, fitting, ...) where speed matters to make astropy an option for large-scale data processing, and having a vbench suite would help make and keep astropy fast.

  • Plotting of sky images, i.e. functionality like APLpy or Kapteyn provide, but integrated into Astropy.

  • Interfacing astropy images, spectra, ... with ds9, Aladin, TOPCAT to make interactive data analysis more pleasant.

  • Crossmatching of astronomical catalogs like e.g. what is implemented in STILS in Java.

    • +1 ... or like the SPHEREMATCH function in IDL. Also note the existence of Erin Sheldon's smatch.

  • Documentation! This isn't really a 'project,' but it would be great to get feedback on the documentation from students who are learning this stuff for the first time. Even better would be to have them contribute documentation where they think it is too vague or confusing as they come to understand the machinery.

  • Tools for simple image + WCS manipulation (e.g. rotation, cutting out subregions, matching image projections). There are already some powerful tools for this in Python (such as Montage) but nothing with the simplicity & ease of use of the IDL astronomy library's hastrom, hrotate, hextract etc command.

  • Implement table merge/join operations (#262)

  • Automatically identify/register arcimages and provide a wavelength solution. This is an annoying task and would be important for many people. It can be first done in 1D and then move up the ladder (in terms of milestones).

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