GSoC 2018 project proposal looking for mentorship.

[vital.f...@gmail.com]

Hello everyone.

I am a PhD student who was advised to look for mentor for this project for the GSoC 2018:

https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/openastronomy.github.io/wiki/Calibration-framework-for-telescope-observations

The project consists in designing a framework to store the steps and the configuration of the reduction steps. This layer would be build on top of available scientific libraries, such as pyraf, astropy, numpy...

The advantage of this scheme would be double: First make it easier for academic and scientific comunities to share and check the reduction of astronomical data: If all the reduction steps are available, it will be possible to anyone to replicate their results. The second advantage consists in being able to propagate the observational error from the raw files to the calibrated frames: By repeating the steps on an uncertainty frame along all the calibration procedure. 

The project includes a simple interface to launch commands and store parameters. However, it would be great to share, or integrate within some of the capabilities in glue since the visualizing the fits files during the calibration steps is indeed essential.

Myself, I would support this project by bringing my expertise on spectroscopic data reduction (These are some video tutorials I have made: https://www.youtube.com/user/SmartCookiev1/playlists). However, I seek a mentor for the project since my experience on python programming cannot reach the quality level of community projects (such as glue). Myself I would take this opportunity to learn more about python :).

Thank you for your time and for any advice you would like to give me.

Vital