Week 12: astroplanning

What I completed this week:

• Submitted my synphot tutorials as a pull request to astropy/astropy-tutorials. Just waiting for someone (outside of my GSoC mentors) to review!
• Moved my synphot work (including the wrapper and signal-to-noise functions) into an experimental folder. I’m still uncertain whether this folder will be merged as an experimental folder or if its contents will be merged back into the synphot API, but I guess we will see..! Also, I’m still open to suggestions on any other functionality I should include.
• Emailed ESO inquiring about any plans to merge skycalc_cli into astroquery, and if they would be open to me submitting a PR (no response yet).
• Thought more about how my wrapper, signal-to-noise functions, and “synspec” can be implemented into already-existing astronomical observing tools. Simply put, I think my GSoC work (and synphot in general) would serve as valuable additions to astroplan. As it stands, astroplan is a great tool for scheduling observations, but its definition leaves its functionality open to aspects of planning which are outside of the scheduling realm:

The goal of astroplan is to make a flexible toolbox for observation planning and scheduling. 

The astroplan Documentation

Specifically, I think a count rate function and exposure time calculator would be of greatest use. Then not only could astroplan help determine when to observe, it could also suggest exposure durations given model photometric/spectroscopic observations generated by synphot/synphot tools.

This week’s goals:

• If everyone is open to the idea, I would like to submit a PR to astroplan for adding the exposure time calculator (supported by synphot and its tools)