The History of a Science Hidden in Astronomy Code - Brandon Rhodes - code::dive 2023

The History of a Science Hidden in Astronomy Code

For thousands of years, humans struggled to understand the paths that the planets take across the night sky. As our instruments improved, our theories were forced to adapt — producing the high-precision computations that we can perform today. We can now place a satellite in orbit around another planet, or even land a rover on its surface. Our astronomy software bears the marks of each one of these innovations. Taking the Skyfield astronomy library as only one of many possible examples, this talk will look at how an accurate astronomy computation must take account of the discoveries of thinkers from Mikołaj Kopernik to Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein.

About the speaker - Brandon Rhodes

Brandon Rhodes is best known as a popular speaker at Python conferences, but his open source projects include C and C++ and even bits of JavaScript. His still maintains the old PyEphem astronomy module he wrote in the 1990s, while his more recent Skyfield library helps Python programmers determine the positions of planets, comets, and satellites with high precision. His ‘Python Patterns’ website helps programmers wade through the conflicting claims of several famous design patterns to determine which ones work well in a modern dynamic programming language.