Re: [boost] New Astronomy Library

Subject: Re: [boost] New Astronomy Library
From: Pranam Lashkari (plashkari628_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-02-22 14:14:55

Sorry for taking too long to replay as I was talking to one of my friends
who is a scientist and works in an observatory.

I completely agree with you that scientist would not move from Python to
C++ easily. But Astronomical data are getting bigger in size and Python
takes too much time to compute them (according to my scientist friend).
That's where C++ can be a dramatic improvement.

Coming to the point of the structure of the library, when I said that we
can follow the structure of Astropy I meant "class structure"(class
hierarchy) and API.

*Now the point is what we can do with this library:*
In observatories to make day to day programming easy, these are some
specific topics which can be covered here,

   1. Noise reduction in astronomical data(various algorithms)
   2. Galaxy morphological classification(classification based on visual
   appearance)
   3. Comparison of images(To find the motion of moving object in space)
   4. Object detection
   5. Light curves of variable stars
   6. Spectroscopy

Above mentioned topics were suggested to me because these are used on daily
basis and can make things faster.

now coming to the amateurs

   1. the coordinate system can help to plan out observations.
   2. reading data from a file(astronomical catalogs)
   3. Creating observation lists

*So the ultimate goal of this library would be to make day to day astronomy
easy and faster by providing features that are used on daily basis by
professionals and amateurs.*

thank you.
pranam lashkari.

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 7:39 PM, degski via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On 13 February 2018 at 05:45, Pranam Lashkari via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> > ... As we all know that python is one of the
> > easiest languages to learn. Not all scientists are programmers and maybe
> > that's why they find python and Astropy easy to use.
> >
>
> The above is being repeated over and over and over again. I find python
> anything but easy to learn, it's rather confusing actually (and verbose).
> If you would want an easy (a little over 20 keywords), versatile language
> (with some rather advanced ideas), pick Lua.
>
>
> > ... build a similar structure to the same library?
>
>
> Isn't it a python lib using NumPy? You're gonna provide language bindings?
>
>
> > It will make things easier for those scientists who do not have
> > much time to learn a new programming language and this will make the
> > transition easier from python to C++.
> >
>
> If you're a scientist, I doubt you'll decide to move from Python to C++ (or
> C for that matter)... Tensorflow has a C++ API, it's so underused that the
> documentation of that API is missing many bits.
>
> If you cannot program, trying to do that in C++ is gonna be a very
> frustrating experience (as in not making any progress whatsoever, which
> means no research grants), iff you have to start from scratch.
>
>
> > Is it a good idea?
> >
>
> Hard to say. Maybe you could explain (to the community) what you would like
> to achieve in terms of "deliverable(s)", i.e. what will the end result be
> (as in, what kind of thing).
>
> The issue is maybe/possibly that Astronomy, as a field, seems to be rather
> niche for a general library as Boost.
>
> degski
>
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