Undergraduate Team Looking for a Package to Start On

Support
#1

I am part of a team of undergraduate computer science students that are hoping to develop a package on the LSST pipeline as part of our senior capstone project. However, as we are all beginners with LSST and working with optical data, we don’t know where to start. We have completed the pipeline setup tutorials and have a basic understanding of how the pipeline works, but aren’t sure what to do next.

Does anyone have any recommendations about packages that we could work on? We are having difficulty finding a place to start. Any help or guidance would be wonderful.

#2

Have you seen the stack club tutorials? They’re works in progress, but may give you some more ideas too.

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#3

Perhaps you could expand upon what the remit of your capstone project is. From your description, it sounds like you don’t just want to use the stack, you actually want to develop one or more of its packages. Is that correct? If so, do you want to develop a package from scratch, or hack an existing package to improve it (e.g., optimise it, or broaden its capabilities)?

It may also be useful to expand upon the capabilities of your team. For example, which coding languages and concepts are the team members most familiar with? Most of the stack is written in Python and C++, so you’ll need to be pretty familiar with at least one of those.

Finally, it may also be useful to expand upon how you came about developing an LSST package as a suitable capstone project. Did your supervisor suggest it, is one of your team members particularly interested in astronomy, maybe?

I’m afraid I’m rather on periphery the LSST pipeline development (I just try to keep up with updates for my own research), but answering the above may help others to identify something suitable.