Hi! I'm an astrophysicist / developer (nowadays more developer than astrohysicist). I mostly write code in C and Java (for work and for personal stuff). My main job is maintaining and developing software for the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) observatory atop Maunakea. Some of the software we develop can have wider application. Hence I'm starting to spin off and open-source some of the more universally applicable bits of our code.
For example, at the SMA (and the MIT Haystack 37-m telescope) we use a customized version of the Naval Observatory Vector Astrometry Software (NOVAS) C 3.1. I have fixed a bunch of bugs in it, cleaned up the API, added browseable documentation, and extended its functionality with new features. My goal is to make it easier and safer to use it, while promoting best practices also. This is is how the SuperNOVAS package on GitHub was born, somewhat recently. It is a light-weight high-precision C/C++ astrometry library capable of sub-microarsecond position calculations. Thus is may serve as a component for running observatories (or your backyard telescope), or a very precise planetarium program, or any other astronomy software that needs to calculate positions of celestial objects with accuracy. The source code and releases are hosted at: https://github.com/Smithsonian/SuperNOVAS And you can find more information, including the online documentation at the project pages at: https://smithsonian.github.io/SuperNOVAS/ Its second release (v1.0.1) just got published some two weeks ago. (Yay!) Next I would like to package it for Fedora, not the least because the Debian folks have expressed interest -- which is all great, but I myself have been a Fedora / RedHatter since '97, so I'd look forward to a Fedora package ever more so. I am hoping to find a sponsor too. If I understand correctly that's a separate step from the self intro here, but if you would want to help guide me anyway, I'd very much welcome it any time. I look forward to working with you and learning from you. cheers, -- Attila. -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
