“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
—
Kranzberg’s
First Law
I’m the Technical Lead of the IAU Minor Planet Center at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I spend most of my time designing and building astrophysical data systems. Underpinning this work is my preoccupation with all of the ways that computers could be revolutionizing science and society — but aren’t yet.
Contact me on Mastodon as @pkgw@mastodon.world or over email at peter@newton.cx. Find out more on my About Me page, or by subscribing to my lightweight newsletter — I use it to send out links to the posts that I write here on this website:
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Latest post:
2025 July 2
At long last, the first data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are starting to become public! Here at the Minor Planet Center we were not only watching last week’s Rubin “First Look” event — we had some work to do too.
Recently:
| 2025 April 29 | CASA 6 is Now in Conda-forge |
| 2025 April 3 | “Generic” Artifacts in GitHub Packages |
| 2025 March 21 | The MPC is Hiring |
| 2025 March 5 | Fun with Databases |