“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 April 29
I’m pleased to report that CASA 6 is now available in conda-forge!
CASA is a software suite for processing radio astronomy data from telescopes
such as the Very Large Array, ALMA, and more. The availability
includes the casatools and casatasks Python packages but not the full suite
of CASA end-user applications. Just run:
$ conda install casatasks
or the equivalent command in a Python environment that has conda-forge enabled.
Recently:
| 2025 April 3 | “Generic” Artifacts in GitHub Packages |
| 2025 March 21 | The MPC is Hiring |
| 2025 March 5 | Fun with Databases |
| 2025 February 1 | DASCH DR7 on ArXiv |