SunPy Update - January 2016#

Hello all,

Sorry for the lack of a December update, the news for December can be summed up as: “Stuart passed his Viva with minor corrections.”

Seeing how we are now in 2016 and the original milestone for 0.7 is the end of January, I hope that many people have made “contribute to SunPy” a new years resolution!! Before we can release 0.7 we need a working Python 3 port, and the unidown branch merged, and the Lightcurve factory implemented.

December News#

Astropy 1.1#

Astropy 1.1 has been released, so you should upgrade your Astropy! Also astropy_helpers 1.1 has been released and David has opened PR #1627 to update the version in SunPy with the new release, which should hopefully fix issues we were having with sphinx and doctests on Travis.

Coming up in January#

OpenAstronomy SunPy and Astropy Workshop#

On 11th to 15th of January at the University of Sheffield there will be a 5 day workshop, with the first two days being a two day Software Carpentry workshop, teaching bash, git and Python. While the rest of the week covers more SunPy and Astropy specific topics. More information can be found on the website.

There are still places available, you can register here.

Weekly Developer Discussions#

The weekly meetings will be continuing this month, they are at 1600UTC each week. We are using Google Hangouts and you can be notified of them by following our Google+ page (normally the join link is posted in IRC once the meeting has started). These meetings are also recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so you can catch up even if you can not attend in person.

Links to November’s meetings are below:

Reviewing Pull Requests#

As always, reviews on pull requests are always welcome, you don’t have to have merge permissions or anything other than a GitHub account to review PRs. You can find a list of all the PRs that need reviewing here :

Another easy way to get involved is with labelling issues, if you are interested in doing this but don’t have permissions to label issues on GitHub, swing by the IRC channel and talk to me (Cadair). Issues that are not labelled can be found here

Summer of Code Project Ideas#

As usual this year SunPy will be applying for the GSOC and SOCIS summer of code programs. As always, the most important part of these applications is having an interesting project ideas list and people willing to mentor students. If you have any interesting project ideas related to SunPy (they do not have to be on the SunPy code base), then please drop us a line on the mailing list, or edit this wiki page.

As we did last year we will be initially applying for GSOC under the OpenAstronomy banner, so suggestions of ways to improve that site, or general involvement with OpenAstronomy would be welcome.

Getting in touch#

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone about our public communication methods. We have two mailing lists, SunPy and sunpy, the main SunPy list is used for general questions and announcements, and the sunpy-dev list is used for developer discussion and organisational emails. We also have the IRC channel, which normally has someone hanging out in it, and is an excellent place to get some real-time help, or to just come for a chat. We also have our Google+ page and a Twitter account.

Happy Pythoning, Stuart