The SunPy Project is looking for new community members to become maintainers of a new magnetic field extrapolation package.
SunPy will provide mentorship in how to maintain a SunPy package.
Ideally anyone interested in the role would be familiar with the magnetic extrapolation algorithms.
If you are interested in taking on this role please comment on this discourse thread.
More details
The pfsspy project has recently been archived by David Stansby, it’s lead author and maintainer.
We want to thank him for his work on pfsspy and a variety of other heliophysics Python projects.
The pfsspy package is now widely used throughout the solar physics community for computing potential field extrapolations, including in several high-profile publications.
Given its wide usage, the SunPy Project believes it is important to continue to provide this functionality within the SunPy ecosystem to ensure it’s longevity.
To that end we are creating a new package within the SunPy ecosystem which, initially, will be a fork of the pfsspy package.
In the longer term, this package may expand to cover other extrapolation techniques the community has an interest in contributing.
To achieve this, we need someone who can bring some expertise on magnetic field extrapolation algorithms and who has time to dedicate to creating and maintaining this package.
The SunPy Project will provide the required package infrastructure and mentorship on package maintenance for anyone interested.
Additionally, this new package will be housed under the SunPy organization on GitHub, similar to existing affiliated packages maintained by the Project.
If you are interested in becoming a maintainer or have more questions, please post on this thread.
Hi Cadair. I am very interested in helping out with this project and continuing pfsspy’s development; however, I am not an expert in magnetic field extrapolation algorithms. I am very familiar with pfsspy and PFSS modeling generally, but would not with my current knowledge be able to provide expert-level insight on other techniques. With this in mind, is there anyway that I could help?
We don’t need people who are familiar with anything else other than PFSS to get started, adding other stuff is definitely a stretch goal.
We haven’t made any concrete plans for how we are going to get the ball rolling on this yet, but a good thing to do would be if you could make it to our weekly community call on Wed at 1600 UTC and say hi. We can chat through stuff there. I think it will be worth giving it a while longer to see if anyone else is interested, hopefully we can get a small team together to reduce the workload on everyone.
I might also be able to help a bit. Have been working with pfsspy only sparsely, but just recently I ported it to conda-forge because we incorporated it partly into Solar-MACH (work in progress).
We haven’t made any concrete plans for how we are going to get the ball rolling on this yet, but a good thing to do would be if you could make it to our weekly community call on Wed at 1600 UTC and say hi. We can chat through stuff there.
Hi again @Cadair. I was unable to attend the weekly community call last Wednesday, and I reached out to you via email about this beforehand (to the address listed on your GitHub profile). Please let me know if you got my message. And apologies if my absence caused any confusion.