Posts

GSoC 2026 - My Journey to SunPy Under OpenAstronomy

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My GSoC Journey I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve been selected for Google Summer of Code 2026  under OpenAstronomy for the SunPy project:  Improving radiospectra’s Functionality and Interoperability. This has been one of the most emotional and memorable journeys of my life so far. Getting Started with Open Source A few months ago, I started exploring open source and eventually came across the SunPy ecosystem and the radiospectra repository. What initially began as curiosity slowly turned into genuine interest as I started understanding the codebase, participating in discussions, attending weekly meetings and contributing through pull requests and issues. As I spent more time with the project, I became increasingly interested in the architectural discussions around scientific software, interoperability, plotting systems and coordinate-aware APIs. Over time, the project became much more than just a GSoC application for me. The Rejection 😢 On 30th April, when the...
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Bringing radiospectra into the Modern SunPy Ecosystem

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What is radiospectra?   If you've ever looked at a spectrogram of a solar radio burst i.e. a colorful time vs frequency heatmap showing how the Sun's radio emission changes during a flare then there's a good chance the data was handled by radiospectra. It's a Python package in the SunPy ecosystem that provides tools for fetching, reading and visualising solar radio spectral data from instruments like e-Callisto, WIND/WAVES and SWAVES. Radiospectra plugs into SunPy's unified data search through Fido, meaning you can query and download radio data from multiple observatories with a few lines of Python in the same way you'd fetch solar images or timeseries data. The problem: a foundation that hasn't kept up 🔍 While radiospectra works, its internal architecture hasn't evolved alongside the rest of the SunPy ecosystem. Here's the core issue: Spectral data is stored as plain NumPy arrays with instrument-specific metadata conventions. There is no unified...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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