Review of A Hack Day: Coding Comes to the U.K. National Astronomy Meeting (NAM)

Robert Simpson gives the inside story of the first – and very successful – Hack Day at NAM 2014.

What did we do?

The marvellous set of creations were fantastic and highlight the range of possible outcomes at events such as this. Timothy Davies (ESO) created a simple, useful tool for quickly creating tiny simulated galaxies, based on bulge-to-disc ratios. Rebecca Smethurst (Oxford) created code that instantly makes your Python plots look better for your presentation slides. Both are perfect examples of building small, shareable tools that you’ve always wanted for yourself.

Hack days are also about using your skills to advance somebody else’s good idea. Kyle Willett (Minnesota) was taken with an idea from another participant to create a map of the UK showing where your nearest astronomy club or degree-granting institution is located. Kyle decided to take the day as a chance to learn some JavaScript and eventually created a Voronoi-tessellated map of the UK – in which the country is grouped into regions evenly spaced around all the astronomy clubs (figure 1). This is based on previous work by Jason Davies (http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/airports).

Geert Barentsen, Jeremy Harwood and Leigh Smith (Hertfordshire) all went diving into unfamiliar data. They decided to use ESA’s Mars Express data archive to make a continuously rolling movie of all its observations. After realizing that such a movie would take days to run (even in fast-forward!) they decided to create an example of the first few chunks of data, ending up with a three-minute trailer of the experience, which you can see at http://youtu.be/KPc6_hReseI. At the last minute, they added in a little extra to the video to give it a bit more cachet with the meme-savvy online crowd: Nyan Cat (figure 2). We can all look forward to the two-day long version of this video when the whole data archive is imported.

Galaxy knit

Other projects are harder to place online, such as Jane Greaves‘s (St Andrews) knitted galaxy cluster – with dark matter contributed by many people at the hack day (figure 4). Several astronomers popped in to contribute to the display!

I spent much of the day working with Edward Gomez (LCOGT) and the littleBits Space Kit. This is a modular system of circuits that lets anyone try their hand at something that ordinarily requires a soldering iron. The littleBits components may be switches, sensors, servos, or anything really, and they connect magnetically to create deceptively simple, yet potentially powerful, circuits. We decided to try to build an exoplanet simulator of some sort and ended up creating a littleBits exoplanet detector and cup orrery (figure 3). Our goal was to come up with something we could sit down and do with school groups in the future.

Prototyping is an essential part of any hack day. Ruth Angus (Oxford) and Joe Zuntz (Manchester) created the beginnings of an exoplanetary travel agent: a set of webpages outlining the known properties of exoplanets in a fun, friendly way. Adam Avison (Jodrell Bank) and Chris North (Cardiff) created the framework for a site that will tell you what was happening in Earth history when the light left an astronomical object. For example, did you know that when we look at the star Deneb today, we’re seeing light that has been travelling since the time of the first known writing in China, or the reign of Rameses the Great in Egypt?

Gender breakdown

A big push was made throughout NAM 2014 to keep track of the gender breakdown of speakers, chairs and people asking questions in sessions. This was inspired by James Davenport (Washington) and his gender study at the 223rd AAS Meeting. Jonathan Pritchard and Karen Masters (Portsmouth) led the charge and asked conference participants to complete an online survey. During the hack day they worked with several others to parse and analyse the data. Interestingly they found that male participants constituted 65% of the attendees but asked 81% of the questions. Female NAM speakers were asked an average of 3.28 questions, whereas their male counterparts were asked 2.64. The results will make interesting reading when they are published and available for comparison with James Davenport’s original work (http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3091).

Indy Leclerq and Stuart Harper (Jodrell Bank) took on a topical astronomical concept: transient sky events. They parsed the Sky Alert website (http://skyalert.org) to create a graphical display that shows events happening in the night sky (https://github.com/SharperJBCA/LiveTransients). This kind of coding project emerges when people have time to think creatively and to chat about their ideas with others.

Finally, Duncan Forgan (Edinburgh) took the “music of the spheres” concept to its logical conclusion and created code to make music from any planetary system listed in the Open Planet Catalogue. Planets are given pitches based on their masses, and their repeated rhythms are spaced according to the period of their orbits. He demonstrated the new tool by playing us sample planetary systems, including our own solar system in which you hear both the high-pitched chirps of the inner planets flitting by every second or so, and the low pulsing beats of the outer planets humming past on longer timescales. You can hear examples on Duncan’s website and the code is available online at GitHub (https://github.com/dh4gan/exoplanet-music).

There were too many other hacks to list, but they included haiku, automatically extracted from arXiv papers by Arfon Smith (GitHub); and a prototype website for collating and commenting upon literature reviews from Lucy Fortson (Minnesota).

Hack days happen all the time in cities around the world. We hope to have another at the next NAM, but in the meantime you can find one near you by searching online, or reading more about Science Hack Day or Astronomy, for example.