“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:

DASCH DR7 on ArXiv

It’s been hard to keep up blogging with my getting settled in at the MPC and (gestures vaguely) everything that’s been going on. So, this is going to be a brief post. But it’s worth mentioning that DASCH DR7 is now on arxiv.org, specifically at arXiv:2501.12977.

Read more …


Recently:

DASCH Data Release 7
The Next Chapter