Slides for my talk during the 27 March 2024 DOEPy Python Exchange
The field of solar physics is primarily concerned with understanding the physics of the complex outer atmosphere of the Sun, the solar corona. Though visible to the naked eye only during a solar eclipse, the corona is observed across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the visible, extreme ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths, by both space- and ground-based observatories. We are currently entering a so-called "golden age" of solar physics in which an increasing number of future solar observatories promise to deepen our understanding of this complex plasma environment. However, effectively using these data to understand the fundamental physical processes in the solar atmosphere requires software capable of searching, ingesting, combining, and analyzing data from these many different data sources, all of which are growing both in size and complexity. The SunPy Project aims to solve this challenge by building and maintaining an ecosystem of interoperable, community-developed, open-source Python packages for analyzing solar physics data. In this talk, I'll provide a brief history of the SunPy Project, the current state of the Project as well as the software landscape in solar physics more broadly, and discuss how the Project is moving forward. Throughout my talk, I will illustrate these points using my own journey into the world of open-source scientific Python software development and how that has informed my career as a solar physicist.
Dr. Will Barnes is a research term faculty in the Department of Physics at American University in Washington, D.C and a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he studies fundamental heating process in the solar corona, the outermost layer of our Sun's atmosphere. Prior to joining American University and NASA, he held a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. In 2019, Will received his Ph.D. from Rice University where he studied observational diagnostics of heating in the Sun's corona and developed open-source Python tools for forward modeling optically thin emission. He currently serves as the deputy lead developer for The SunPy Project which oversees the development of sunpy, a community-developed, free and open-source solar data analysis Python package, in addition to a number of other Python packages widely used by the solar physics community.