Star Hackers: Scientists Hold 1st Astronomy 'Hack Day'

Astronomers have a "Big Data" problem. While telescopes around the world record reams of data every day, researchers struggle to manage this surplus of information. But there is a change brewing within the astronomy community, one where researchers assume many different roles: astronomer, hacker and communicator.

DotAstronomy, a community that bridges the gap between science research and computer coding, hosted the first "Hack Day" exclusively for astronomy in the United States, last month at the Bit.ly headquarters in New York.

The Dec. 15 event was co-sponsored by Bit.ly and Harvard's Seamless Astronomy Group. Participants had a single day to tackle a problem within astronomy data. The day was split into three parts: presentations of tools that some participants have been working on, hack time, and presentations of the day's accomplishments.

Participants came from all over the tri-state area to learn from other astronomy hackers and work on joint projects. Most of them were either professors or graduate students from NYU, Harvard, Yale or CUNY, but there were others from non-astronomy backgrounds as well.

Many of the tools presented were frameworks to make astronomy data more manageable, often with a heavy community and open-source aspect.

For example, there was Astropy, a community-driven astronomy package; Planethunters.org, where public online users can hunt for exoplanets; the yt-project, a community-driven platform that transforms data into breathtaking graphic models, to help researchers ask better questions from their data; and an API (an interface between a user and a site's database) where you can easily look up any celestial object's spectral data from archives of the Sloan Digital Survey.

Hacking and camaraderie

After the main presentations, everyone grabbed a quick lunch and circled the whiteboard to pitch their hacks. They then split into groups and started exchanging ideas, debugging, and scrawling flow charts or models. Practically all the participants were acquainted with Python computer coding, but still, the best hackers quickly stood out, and many clamored for their aid. [5 Threats That Keep Security Experts Up at Night]

Demitri Muna is one of those hackers. He runs an online forum and workshop called SciCoder, teaching scientists how to efficiently work in Python. Muna is working toward a SciCoder book, which will include a free PDF for the astronomy community.

Muna worked during the hack day with Kelle Cruz from the American Museum of Natural History department of astrophysics and others to create a "SQLite" database to store brown dwarf star data that they could distribute to members' email accounts.