Creating and Maintaining a Scientific Software Product Featuring SpecpolFlow

ORAL

Abstract

Spectropolarimetry is an important tool in astronomy, particularly in regards to stellar magnetism as it allows us to measure and characterize magnetic fields and their influence on both the star and its environment. Therefore, the development and maintenance of modern, flexible, and accessible computational tools that enable spectropolarimetric studies is essential. SpecpolFlow is a new software package for Python which provides a user-friendly pipeline for the analysis of optical spectropolarimetric data. While one focus of SpecpolFlow is on the accuracy of scientific results, the other important aspect is maintenance, accessibility, and ease of use. To that end, the package is fully documented and also includes an extensive set of tutorials at a variety of different levels of detail, enabling access for users at all mastery levels. Additionally, we ran a short virtual workshop demonstrating the basics of SpecpolFlow, which was received positively by the community. In this contribution, I will discuss how we made, maintain, and disseminate SpecpolFlow to the community as well as highlight some recent scientific results.

*This research was supported by the Munich Institute for Astro-, Particle and BioPhysics (MIAPbP), which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2094 – 390783311. The SpecpolFlow team also gratefully acknowledges funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101079231 (EXOHOST), from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Horizon Europe Guarantee Scheme (grant number 10051045), from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-2108455, from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-2107871, from the Delaware Space Grant College and Fellowship Program (NASA Grant 80NSSC20M0045), and from the CAPES-PrInt program (#88887.683070/2022-00 and #88887.802913/2023-00).

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Publication: Folsom et al. (in prep.)

Presenters

  • Patrick James Stanley

    • University of Delaware

Authors

  • Patrick James Stanley

    • University of Delaware

  • Colin Folsom

    • Dept. of Physics, Royal Military College of Canada

  • Christi Erba

    • East Tennessee State University

  • Veronique Petit

    • Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware
    • University of Delaware

  • Shaquann Saddat Seadrow

    • University of Delaware

  • Tali Marshall Natan

    • University of Delaware

  • Bonnie Zaire

    • Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

  • Mary Oksala

    • California Lutheran University

  • Federico Villadiego-Forero

    • University of Delaware

  • Robin Moore

    • Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Bartol Research Institute, University of Delaware

  • Marisol Catalan Olais

    • University of Delaware