Andrew Williams
I’m an optical astronomer who moved from research into software for telescope and instrumentation automation, and I've been working on the Murchison Widefield Array (a large radio telescope in the Murchison region of Western Australia) and related instrumentation since 2007. I work for Curtin University, in Perth, Australia.
He/Him
Session
Astronomers have been dealing with digital data since the 1980s and online databases
since the early 90's, and now, almost all research astronomers use Python to access and
process that data. Most astronomical database are open to the public, and most research
software tools are either open source, or freely available. I'll give an intro, aimed at
non-astronomers, to some Python packages (astropy, skyfield) and online research tools.
This talk will give an overview on what tools and databases are available and how to access
them. Maybe you're writing a game, and you want the 3D locations and properties of the
nearest 10,000 stars (or extrasolar planets, or galaxies). Maybe you're building a Solar
panel that tracks the Sun, or a camera mount that tracks the International Space
Station. Maybe you're trying to model shadow lengths and directions in satellite images. Or
maybe you just want to play around with real telescope images that haven't had a PR
department make them 'prettier'...