Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXVI

This volume contains papers presented at the twenty-sixth annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS XXVI). The ADASS conference is the premier conference for the exchange of information about astronomical software and is held each year, hosted by a different astronomical institution. The conference provides a forum for astronomers, software engineers and data specialists from all around the world to discuss software, algorithms, technologies and recommendations applied to all aspects of astronomy, from telescope operations to data reduction, from data management to computing. The key themes for ADASS XXVI included: long-term data management in astronomical data archives, management of scientific and data analysis projects, connections between large databases and data reduction and analysis, HPC and distributed computing, the usage of Python in astronomy, and others. The conference also touched upon data modelling in astronomy and other topics, including demo booths, "bird of a feather" sessions, focus demos, and tutorials. This proceedings volume presents over a hundred and eighty reports from the oral, posters and other contributions to the conference

Improving Software Citation and Credit

The past year has seen movement on several fronts for improving software citation, including the Center for Open Science's Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, the Software Publishing Special Interest Group that was started at January's AAS meeting in Seattle at the request of that organization's Working Group on Astronomical Software, a Sloan-sponsored meeting at GitHub in San Francisco to begin work on a cohesive research software citation-enabling platform, the work of Force11 to "transform and improve" research communication, and WSSSPE's ongoing efforts that include software publication, citation, credit, and sustainability. Brief reports on these efforts were shared at the BoF, after which participants discussed ideas for improving software citation, generating a list of recommendations to the community of software authors, journal publishers, ADS, and research authors. The discussion, recommendations, and feedback will help form recommendations for software citation to those publishers represented in the Software Publishing Special Interest Group and the broader community.Comment: Birds of a Feather session organized by the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, http://ascl.net/ ); to be published in Proceedings of ADASS XXV (Sydney, Australia; October, 2015). 4 page

AAO Starbugs: software control and associated algorithms

The Australian Astronomical Observatory's TAIPAN instrument deploys 150 Starbug robots to position optical fibres to accuracies of 0.3 arcsec, on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. This paper describes the software system developed to control and monitor the Starbugs, with particular emphasis on the automated path-finding algorithms, and the metrology software which keeps track of the position and motion of individual Starbugs as they independently move in a crowded field. The software employs a tiered approach to find a collision-free path for every Starbug, from its current position to its target location. This consists of three path-finding stages of increasing complexity and computational cost. For each Starbug a path is attempted using a simple method. If unsuccessful, subsequently more complex (and expensive) methods are tried until a valid path is found or the target is flagged as unreachable.Comment: 10 pages, to be published in Proc. SPIE 9913, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy IV; 201