SOCIS progress

Hello! I am Florian, the student by the ESA SOCIS 2011 to work on SunPy. I am currently a student at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria majoring in Software and Information Engineering . The code I am working on can be found on GitHub segfaulthunter / sunpy. In this post I am going to give a short introduction to the work I have done so far. We will be posting short tutorials sometime soon.

First, I have been working on a VSO (Virtual Solar Observatory) adapter in Python (Code here, documentation here) which is now finished. The VSO is a service to obtain solar data from the instruments that observe it. I have conceived a new API that is capable of expressing more complicated queries than the one in IDL was able to; moreover I have added a legacy API that tries to mimic the IDL search query as closely as possible (it does not attempt of mimicing IDL’s feature for expanding substrings of parameters to the respective parameter because the feature does not make sense in the context of Python). I consider the adapter stable and functional by now.

I have also been working on an adapter for the HEK HER (Helioevents Registry). The HER is a service to query for solar metadata (data about events that happened on the Sun). It currently works but needs some more attention for users to be able to get the most out of it. I have also conceived an API for this service that I think naturally exposes it to Python programming language.

It has also been important to me to review and, if necessary, refactor old code, work on unittesting, and help the team to get the hang of git and the other tools used for developing SunPy. In less than a month I will be giving a talk at the University of Graz to introduce scientific computing with Python and SunPy and preparing it will be the main focus of the following weeks to come. If all goes well a recording of the talk will be available for everyone to view online.

At this point, I would like to thank the SunPy team and ESA for giving me the opportunity to work in a scientific environment and I hope that the following months will be as fun and productive as the last month!