GSoC 2025

Okay, so astronomers working with LSST don't just use Right Ascension and Declination like everyone else. They have a whole sky-mapping system built on tracts and patches. The best way I can describe it is to imagine the night sky is a giant quilt. A tract is a big square piece of that quilt, and a patch is a smaller square within it. I spent days just trying to figure out how to convert standard coordinates into this system. The CoordinateConverter class is finally starting to make sense, but it's been a deep dive into concepts like SpherePoint, degrees, and the difference between PARENT and LOCAL origins. Astronomy coordinate systems are wild!

This week's adventure? Environment management. I discovered we were running an older version of the LSST Stack (v28.0.1) while the latest was v29.1.1. The update took two full days, mostly because of breaking changes between the versions. Somehow, I now have three different LSST stacks on my machine (don't ask why). The good news is that VS Code is playing nicely with all of them, and lsst-activate has become my favorite new command. It’s clear that managing the environment is half the battle in this project.

My first week of the coding period is in the books! I started with what I thought would be a simple task: creating a Butler repository from some demo data. I quickly learned that "simple" and "LSST" rarely belong in the same sentence.  The demo data has its own peculiar structure, and I had to wrap my head around instrument registration and setting up collections. My terminal is now a historical record of my many failed butler create and butler register-instrument attempts. But, after a lot of trial and error, I finally have a working repository! In a project this massive, these small wins feel absolutely huge.

I was glued to reddit and the website the whole time for 4 hours. The results came out later than UTC 18:00 and didn't get the mail until four hours beyond the scheduled time.  None of my friends got in, so was kinda anticipating a rejection too, but to my surprise I got in. I am really excited to go through this journey again. It would be amazing.