MAKE ACTION PLAN

[jradavenport]

Goals

There is sustained interest in this project, 3 years after I wrote it as a means to procrastinate on finishing my PhD thesis... Many suggestions and improvements have been made, and PyDIS has been used successfully for research-capable analysis of DIS and a few other instruments. Now we need a plan for the next phase.

I see immediate goals for PyDIS:

• improving the reduction pipeline, particularly the wavelength calibration
• real-time, hands-free reduction while observing with DIS
• make PyDIS compliant with Python3, and astropy friendly

And the long-term goal as:

• demonstrating the value of such a pipeline so that APO will pay somebody to build one (maybe modify this one?) for their next facility spectrograph.

NEEDED

1. a cohort of people who are interested in PyDIS and willing to help, even a little
2. a dedicated time and place to work on the code regularly
3. money to pay a grad student (for the summer?) to improve the code with me. Maybe look at GSOC 2019?

[solontoi]

As one of those has done "research-capable analysis of DIS" with earlier version of this code, I would be willing to pitch in, although most of my working with it has been in tweaking the output to better accommodate my observations of the vermin of the sky, asteroids.

I can confirm that PyDIS is "so easy to use that a Windows-using physics sophomore can do science with it"

[jradavenport]

some steps forward today:

• code moved to GitHub Organization to enable other people to help administer it (also for branding reasons)
• @bmorris3 going to help repackage into the astropy template