Category Archives: news

The 3rd DC/MD/VA Summer Astrophysics Meeting

On Thursday, June 25, I attended part of the 3rd annual DC/MD/VA Summer Astrophysics Meeting; duties elsewhere prevented me from attending the whole event, alas. This meeting, which rotates among the sponsoring universities, was held this year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and is intended for senior undergraduates and graduate students to network, present their work, and facilitate interaction among local institutions. At least ten area universities were represented at the event.

25hubbleI arrived in plenty of time to hear keynote speaker Dr. Jennifer Wiseman‘s excellent presentation The Hubble Space Telescope: 25 Years of Science and Discovery; it is always a pleasure to hear her speak.

Next on the agenda were Jeremy Hare from George Washington University, who presented Unveiling the nature of high energy sources using machine learning and Joel Coley from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with Probing the long-term variability and eclipsing properties of high-mass X-ray binaries. After a short break, the program continued with a presentation on The science of WFIRST: Gravitational microlensing, the galactic bulge, and the transit method, this originally to be presented by Kathryn Waychoff of Dartmouth College and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, but given in her absence instead by three of GSFC undergraduate summer interns whose names I unfortunately did not catch* Nyki Anderson, Emily Kilen, and Sean Terry; they did an amazing job. (I kept thinking, “These are summer interns?!?!” They really knew their stuff!)

posterMy presentation on the ASCL was the last of the day. Only a few people present had heard of the ASCL before this meeting; I was happy for the opportunity to bring the ASCL to this audience. My talk covered what the ASCL is, why it exists, and how it has grown and is used by the community; my PowerPoint presentation (with speaker notes) is available for download.

In addition to Thursday afternoon’s presentations, I got a chance to peruse posters and talk with some of the poster presenters. I’m so pleased I could participate, and wish only that I had been able to attend all of it! The future of astrophysics is in good hands. Kudos to the organizers and participants for such an excellent event.

*My thanks to Sean for filling in the blanks for me!

May 2015 additions to the ASCL

Thirty-four codes were added to the ASCL in May 2015:

2dfdr: Data reduction software
ARoME: Analytical Rossiter-McLaughlin Effects
ASteCA: Automated Stellar Cluster Analysis
Athena3D: Flux-conservative Godunov-type algorithm for compressible magnetohydrodynamics
BAYES-X: Bayesian inference tool for the analysis of X-ray observations of galaxy clusters

CALCEPH: Planetary ephemeris files access code
CANDID: Companion Analysis and Non-Detection in Interferometric Data
caret: Classification and Regression Training
COBS: COnstrained B-Splines
cosmoabc: Likelihood-free inference for cosmology

CUTE: Correlation Utilities and Two-point Estimation
dStar: Neutron star thermal evolution code
FCLC: Featureless Classification of Light Curves
fits2hdf: FITS to HDFITS conversion
HALOGEN: Approximate synthetic halo catalog generator

KS Integration: Kelvin-Stokes integration
Lensed: Forward parametric modelling of strong lenses
LSSGALPY: Visualization of the large-scale environment around galaxies on the 3D space
missForest: Nonparametric missing value imputation using random forest
Planck Level-S: Planck Simulation Package

POKER: P Of K EstimatoR
pyMCZ: Oxygen abundances calculations and uncertainties from strong-line flux measurements
PyTransit: Transit light curve modeling
relline: Relativistic line profiles calculation
RESOLVE: Bayesian algorithm for aperture synthesis imaging in radio astronomy

rvfit: Radial velocity curves fitting for binary stars or exoplanets
SCEPtER: Stellar CharactEristics Pisa Estimation gRid
SNEC: SuperNova Explosion Code
Snoopy: General purpose spectral solver
SNooPy: TypeIa supernovae analysis tools

Starfish: Robust spectroscopic inference tools
StellaR: Stellar evolution tracks and isochrones tools
TEA: Thermal Equilibrium Abundances
TFIT: Mixed-resolution data set photometry package

April 2015 additions to the ASCL

Twenty-one codes were added to the ASCL in April 2015:

abcpmc: Approximate Bayesian Computation for Population Monte-Carlo code
BGLS: A Bayesian formalism for the generalised Lomb-Scargle periodogram
chimenea: Multi-epoch radio-synthesis data imaging
CosmoTransitions: Cosmological Phase Transitions
D3PO: Denoising, Deconvolving, and Decomposing Photon Observations

DPI: Symplectic mapping for binary star systems for the Mercury software package
drive-casa: Python interface for CASA scripting
EsoRex: ESO Recipe Execution Tool
HOTPANTS: High Order Transform of PSF ANd Template Subtraction
IGMtransmission: Transmission curve computation

JWFront: Wavefronts and Light Cones for Kerr Spacetimes
kozai: Hierarchical triple systems evolution
LineProf: Line Profile Indicators
MCSpearman: Monte Carlo error analyses of Spearman’s rank test
MRrelation: Posterior predictive mass distribution

samiDB: A Prototype Data Archive for Big Science Exploration
Self-lensing binary code with Markov chain
SPA: Solar Position Algorithm
SOAP 2.0: Spot Oscillation And Planet 2.0
UPMASK: Unsupervised Photometric Membership Assignment in Stellar Clusters

WebbPSF: James Webb Space Telescope PSF Simulation Tool

Closure of Google Code and impact on ASCL records

Google has announced the closure of its Google Code service. Google suggests several courses of action and states, “We … offer stand-alone tools for migrating to GitHub and Bitbucket, and SourceForge offers a Google Code project importer service.”

Please take steps to save your software! If you migrate your code to another site, I would appreciate knowing the new URL. If you are no longer working on your software and do not want to migrate it to another project hosting site, please allow the ASCL to store an archive file (tarball/zip/etc.) of it with the ASCL entry so it remains available to support your written research record, or select another option to preserve your code. If you would like to have the ASCL host an archive file, please contact me; thank you.

February 2015 additions to the ASCL

Twenty-three codes were added in February, 2015:

ADAM: All-Data Asteroid Modeling
AMIsurvey: Calibration and imaging pipeline for radio data
AstroLines: Astrophysical line list generator in the H-band
Camelus: Counts of Amplified Mass Elevations from Lensing with Ultrafast Simulations
HDS: Hierarchical Data System

KAPPA: Optically thin spectra synthesis for non-Maxwellian kappa-distributions
ketu: Exoplanet candidate search code
libnova: Celestial mechanics, astrometry and astrodynamics library
Magnetron: Fitting bursts from magnetars
MaLTPyNT: Quick look timing analysis for NuSTAR data

Montblanc: GPU accelerated Radio Interferometer Measurement Equations in support of Bayesian Inference for Radio Observations
nbody6tt: Tidal tensors in N-body simulations
NGenIC: Cosmological structure initial conditions
OpenOrb: Open-source asteroid orbit computation software
PARSEC: PARametrized Simulation Engine for Cosmic rays

PolyChord: Nested sampling for cosmology
PyBDSM: Python Blob Detection and Source Measurement
Rabacus: Analytic Cosmological Radiative Transfer Calculations
RH 1.5D: Polarized multi-level radiative transfer with partial frequency distribution
ROBOSPECT: Width fitting program

SPHGR: Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics Galaxy Reduction
XFGLENSES: Gravitational lens visualizer
XPCell: Convective plasma cells simulator

ASCL visit to NIST

On Thursday, February 12, I visited the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD on February 12 to present a seminar titled Restoring reproducibility: Making scientist software discoverable to the research reproducibility users’ group there. Hosted by Chandler Becker and Robert Hanisch, I also had the opportunity to talk with Jim Warren before the presentation; he asked excellent questions during the Q&A, too. Bob and I have often discussed (even argued!) about the amount of metadata the ASCL should maintain, and Jim’s questions were on this point.

After the presentation, I talked with Dan Wheeler, Kimberly Tryka, Andrea Medina-Smith, and Jonathan Guyer. Dan had excellent ideas for the ASCL; as we were standing by the conference room door, I didn’t have the opportunity to write these down but I hope to continue the discussion via email. Kimberly, Andrea, and I talked about metadata, indexing software, and how the ASCL maintains its links to software download sites. We would like to create a way to exchange and share discussion with a larger community and have already started chatting about how to do this in email. Jonathan and I talked generally about the ASCL and how change can occur in a community. After that, Chandler took me to the NIST museum (so cool!) and Bob showed me around a bit before my departure. I had a very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable afternoon!

The abstract and PowerPoint file for my presentation are below; the notes in the slides provide most of the text of my talk, though sometimes simply as bullet points.

Abstract: Source codes are increasingly important for the advancement of science in general and astrophysics in particular. Journal articles meant to detail the general logic behind new results and ideas often do not make the source codes that generated these results available, decreasing the transparency and integrity of the research. The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a registry of scientist-written software used in astronomy research. The challenges of creating and growing the resource will be covered by its current editor, who will also discuss specific steps the ASCL has taken to improve code discovery in astronomy and the effect this work is having within astronomy and more broadly in other research areas.

NISTpresentationslides_Feb12

January 2015 additions to the ASCL

ASCL poster at AAS

poster discussing ASCL enhancements, including one-click author search and multiple browsing options

Abstract: The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) is a free online registry of codes used in astornomy research. Indexed by ADS, it now contains nearly 1,000 codes and with recent major changes, is better than ever! The resource has a new infrastructure that offers greater flexibility and functionality for users, including an easier submission process, better browsing, one-click author search, and an RSS feeder for news. The new database structure is easier to maintain and offers new possibilities for collaboration. Come see what we’ve done!

Authors: Alice Allen (ASCL), Judy Schmidt (ASCL), Bruce Berriman (IPAC/Caltech), Kimberly DuPrie (ASCL/STScI), Robert J. Hanisch (NIST), Jessica D. Mink (SAO), Robert J. Nemiroff (MTU), Lior Shamir (LTU), Keith Shortridge (AAO), Mark B. Taylor (UBristol), Peter J. Teuben (UMD), John F. Wallin (MTSU)