We’re organising the first JuliaAstro call! This will be a very preliminary meeting, to know each other and talk about the development of Julia packages in the astronomy/astrophysics domain.
If you’re interest in this topic and want to join the call (and have some minutes to spare to check a few boxes 
), please fill this doodle. We’re aiming to meet in the next 3 weeks, so please fill the Doodle by next Sunday.
Thanks to all of you who participated to the doodle, it’s great to see some new names (at least for me)! The first JuliaAstro call will happen next Thursday December 9th at 20:00 UTC. Here is a link to notes and agenda: JuliaAstro meetings - HackMD (note that editing the document requires you to sign in, but you can use GitHub credentials, no need to create a new account). I’ll add in that document a link to a Zoom meeting in a few days, so check back again in a few days. Everybody who’s interested in the topic is welcome, see you there!
Following up from the success of the previous meeting, we want to start a regular series of JuliaAstro calls. If you are interested in joining us, please fill in your availability in this form: JuliaAstro meeting - When2meet (note: you can select and unselect rectangles). The poll covers a 4-week window to organise also feature events: think of that as last-first-second-third week of the month.
We’ll meet next Friday January 28th at 19:00! Closer to the event I’ll add a link to a Zoom meeting in the shared document JuliaAstro meetings - HackMD. Please add a topic you want to discuss to the agenda, if you plan to attend!
The next JuliaAstro Zoom meeting is Thursday, January 23, 2025, 15:00 GMT (12:00 EST, 09:00 PST).
The main topic of discussion is funding. This issue stems from the fact that six Julia proposals were submitted to NASA in June 2024. All had excellent to very good reviews, but all were declined. If the community is to move forward, we need to organize and make a concerted effort to get funding.
We are at a critical juncture in astronomical computing. The next generation of large ground and space based observatories; namely, Roman, Rubin, and the ngVLA; will generate an immense volume of data. It is becoming apparent that Python and Astropy cannot process this data efficiently. Because of this, the data processing teams are talking about limiting computer resources, and therefore, limiting your ability to do science. We need to start now to demonstrate and convince the astronomical community that Julia is the long term answer to this problem.
Reminder: JuliaAstro meeting tomorrow.