2024 March 21
The work on DASCH continues to move forward! Yesterday, I posted a first draft of a new set of resources for astronomers. These are collected under the DASCH DRnext moniker and are now ready to be checked out.
The fact underlying the DRnext designation is that while DASCH has historically had a series of “data releases” (DRs), they weren’t really releases in the usual sense. Normally a DR is associated with a specific set of immutable artifacts, so that if you choose to work with, say, SDSS DR12, you’ll always get exactly the same results if you repeat the same queries. But DASCH only has one set of data servers, and they're always being updated as scanning proceeds and the data processing gets refined, so we’re unable to provide locked-in artifacts. Historically, the DASCH DRs were basically about lifting restrictions on public access to certain portions of the sky.
It would be nice to be able to provide traditional, immutable DRs, but with the
current resources and system architecture that’s not feasible. In the meantime,
the “DRnext” label is the place where the latest-and-greatest DASCH docs and
tools will accumulate — sort of like the main branch of a repository as
opposed to a versioned release.
So, what’s just landed on main?
The centerpiece of DRnext is an effort to deliver better tools for scientific data analysis via daschlab, the Python package that I’ve mentioned here a few times. In support of this, we now have:
- The demo video I posted about earlier
- Python API reference docs (which I also mentioned earlier)
- A tutorial slideshow that lets you work through the notebook shown in the video, via a MyBinder notebook
- The beginnings of a lightcurve reduction cookbook based on daschlab (although there's no reason you couldn’t use the same techniques in a different data-analysis system)
- Instructions for installing daschlab locally
Integrated with this are several other new resources:
- An Introduction to DASCH slideshow aimed at astronomers
- A cloud-powered sample “quicklook” notebook aiming to provide an alternative to the Cannon web-based plotting tools
- Reference documentation of the DASCH lightcurve table columns
- Thorough cross-referencing to the newly-launched StarGlass website and API where appropriate
- Reorganizing the existing material to hopefully make it more manageable
If you look at the DRnext landing page, I have very plainly used the Diátaxis (née Divio) documentation model for organizing things. This is the first time that I’ve put together a landing page with an explicit Tutorial/How-To/Explainer/Reference breakdown; in this particular case, at least, I think it works well. (All of this might also help explain why I’ve been thinking about digital documentation lately, although that’s something I do pretty often regardless.)
I’ve tried a couple of new things in assembling this documentation. One is the way that I’ve presented the “Introduction to DASCH” material as a web-based slideshow; historically I would have written this kind of material up as a brief document. I find it a little painful to admit, but more and more I feel like slide decks are a good way to deliver this kind of information; the pagination breaks things up into digestible chunks in a way that’s easier to approach than even a relatively short single-column presentation. (Drive-by hot take: in practice if not stated intent, Knuth’s literate programming is basically a way to PowerPoint-ify source code.) I would hate to only deliver this kind of slideshow in a properietary format unrecognized by the browser, like a PPTX file, but since I can deliver the slides seamlessly using reveal.js, I’m much more comfortable making them the exclusive publication format for this information.
Building on that, the daschlab RY Cnc tutorial is delivered as yet another slideshow, one in which most of the slides contain video clips showing how the software is used interactively. The idea is that people can follow along the slides, and play and replay the clips, while using the notebook in a separate browser window. I think that video examples are super important for showing people how to use the highly interactive daschlab software; hopefully the slide-based presentation once again breaks things into nicely digestible chunks. It turned out to be relatively easy to record one long screencast of myself running through the notebook, then to use Kdenlive to slice it up into short clips suitable for each slide.
Finally, I’m hopeful that the “cloud quicklook notebook” idea will provide a decent alternative to DASCH’s legacy web-based lightcurve plotting tool. While the legacy tool is not super featureful, can produce genuinely misleading output, and is nigh-unmaintainble, it is clearly really important to give people a way to peek at some data right in their web browser, and that’s something that’s generally tricky with Jupyter/code-oriented tools. I’m crossing my fingers that a lightweight notebook can meet that need, and hopefully the “quicklook” framing will help people see it in the right light.
There are plenty of systems aiming to integrate this kind of notebook into web sites/apps in a much smoother way, but I don’t think that DASCH has the resources to pursue them right now. So for the time being the quicklook is based on MyBinder, which is a great service, especially because it’s free … but it’s slow, and not always reliable. Even if we don’t add some slick Solara-type integration where you don’t even realize that you’re running code, I think that the UX would feel a lot better if the notebook could reliably spin up in just five or ten seconds. One of the next things I want to do is look into setting up daschlab on a science platform service like SciServer, or something that can hopefully offer ease-of-use comparable to MyBinder with better performance. Here at the CfA, there’s a vision of building a “Nexus” science platform (based on Rubin). It’s still in the early stages, so it’s not something that I expect to be able to integrate any time soon, but it would be an ideal home for this kind of capability.