Good day
I attended a great short talk given by Sarah Caddy last Saturday at the Macquarie University Astronomy Open Night in Sydney and she presented an overview of the Huntsman telescope and her research on Galactic Merges.
She mentioned how there is a lot of work to be done on the software tracking of the telescope, and through browsing I found out the trackin software is based on the POCS software project.
I had a look at the GitHub repo and it looks very interesting but also a little daunting
I’m a professional software developer based in Sydney working mainly on back-end systems for Financial Services. I also have an interest in Astronomy (albeit dormant since childhood) and I thought it could be an interesting project for me to get involved.
I’ve contributed to Open Source software projects before (including a small contribution to Discourse, which you are using to run this forum :)) but I don’t really know Python (I come from C/C++ but those days I mainly use Java, C#, Swift and various flavours of JavaScript) and my background in Astronomy is…not existent beyond Uni Physics (which I mostly forgot unfortunately).
I think I could easily handle installing the dev environment, and I’m also very familiar with Git. Learning Python should not be a problem. However, looking at the list of issues in GitHub I could not really find anything that looked simple or small enough for me to start having a look at to get myself familiar with the environment and software.
Would you have any suggestion on what I could start looking at that does not require much background knowledge?
Time permitting with my full time job I would love to potentially help out as I can.
Thanks heaps