I am an astrophysicist and I study neutron stars and black holes using gravitational waves, ripples in space time produced when pairs of these compact objects smash into each other. My day job is analyzing data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to pinpoint where these signals come from on the sky, and my night job involves using a variety of telescopes on the ground and in space to find and study their counterparts in gamma-rays, X-rays, visible light, infrared, and radio.
Literally all of the software that I use in my research is open source, and I love to share that software with other scientists, educators, and astronomy enthusiasts by making the software easy to use in Debian. I first got into doing a bit of software packaging while I was working on my Ph.D. at Caltech (2009-2015) because I tended to make use of a lot of different open-source astronomy software projects that were not easy to install on my laptop and not installed on Debian computing clusters that I was using at them time.
My main areas of interest in Debian are open-source astronomy packages. As part of the Debian-Astro team, I maintain packages for manipulating HEALPix all-sky images, which are used for cosmic microwave background maps and gravitational-wave sky maps. I also help out a bit with curating Astropy and affiliated packages, which I use constantly and contribute to upstream occasionally. As a Debian developer, I hope to bring more software for studying gravitational-wave observations into Debian-Astro.
I am an astrophysicist and I study neutron stars and black holes using gravitational waves, ripples in space time produced when… Expand