Research Software

Sunpy

Jul 19, 2020. | By: @vsoch

This week for the sofware survey we are highlighting sunpy/sunpy, a Python library for Solar Physics. SunPy handle both data analysis and visualization, and has quite a lovely logo!

/rseng/assets/img/posts/showcase/sunpy.svg

I’ve made it big intentionally - do you notice anything? The middle is in fact a snake, and you can see his tongue too!

Annotate Away!

If you want to jump right in, you can:

or learn more about it in the following sections.

What is sunpy?
When was it created?
How do I cite it?
How do I contribute to the software survey
Where can I learn more?

What is sunpy?

How does our sun, or more generally, a star like it, influence the surrounding planets and galaxy? Solar physics is essentially the domain of science that aims to answer these kinds of questions. Sunpy is closely related in development to Astropy, and both community libraries aim to provide data analysis and visualization for solar physics researchers. In fact, look at this beautiful shot of our sun, generated by Sunpy!

/rseng/assets/img/posts/showcase/sunpy.png

When was it created?

SunPy was created in 2011, and the package (and community!) is exciting because it can empower you to analyze a huge set of growing solar physics data. To get a sense of what is possible, you should check out the sunpy examples gallery:

👉️ sunpy examples gallery

In fact, if you love Python, or are inspired by this kind of work, SunPy (via NumFocus) is looking for a contract developer. This job was advertised on the us-rse jobs board.

How do I cite it?

See this section of the website for two notable publications (one shown below):

@ARTICLE{sunpy_community2020,
  doi = {10.3847/1538-4357/ab4f7a},
  url = {https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab4f7a},
  author = The SunPy Community and Barnes, Will T. and Bobra, Monica G. and Christe, Steven D. and Freij, Nabil and Hayes, Laura A. and Ireland, Jack and Mumford, Stuart and Perez-Suarez, David and Ryan, Daniel F. and Shih, Albert Y. and Chanda, Prateek and Glogowski, Kolja and Hewett, Russell and Hughitt, V. Keith and Hill, Andrew and Hiware, Kaustubh and Inglis, Andrew and Kirk, Michael S. F. and Konge, Sudarshan and Mason, James Paul and Maloney, Shane Anthony and Murray, Sophie A. and Panda, Asish and Park, Jongyeob and Pereira, Tiago M. D. and Reardon, Kevin and Savage, Sabrina and Sipőcz, Brigitta M. and Stansby, David and Jain, Yash and Taylor, Garrison and Yadav, Tannmay and Rajul, and Dang, Trung Kien},
  title = {The SunPy Project: Open Source Development and Status of the Version 1.0 Core Package},
  journal = {The Astrophysical Journal},
  volume = {890},
  issue = {1},
  pages = {68-},
  publisher = {American Astronomical Society},
  year = {2020}
}

How do I get started?

If you want to get started with sunpy, the following resources are suggested:

And of course you can ask questions or post issues on the GitHub issues board.

How do I contribute to the software survey?

or read more about annotation here. You can clone the software repository to do bulk annotation, or annotation any repository in the software database, We want annotation to be fun, straight-forward, and easy, so we will be showcasing one repository to annotate per week. If you’d like to request annotation of a particular repository (or addition to the software database) please don’t hesitate to open an issue or even a pull request.

Where can I learn more?

You might find these other resources useful:

The Research Software Database on GitHub
RSEpedia Documentation
Google Docs Manuscript you are invited to contribute to.
Annotation Documentation for RSEpedia
Annotation Tutorial in RSEng docs

For any resource, you are encouraged to give feedback and contribute!