Simon Willison’s Weblog

Python in the Scientific World. Python continues to make strides in the scientific world—and the Hubble Space Telescope team have been using it for 10 years!

# 6th November 2009, 11:04 am / astronomy, guido-van-rossum, hubblespacetelescope, python, science, scipy

Found in space. The Astrometry bot on Flickr (which detects which part of the night sky is contained within your photo and adds notes to some of the more interesting stars) is the most delightful use of the Flickr API I’ve ever seen. This interview provides some background, including a link to a paper on the “scale and rotation invariant hashing algorithm” that is used to build the index.

# 18th February 2009, 10:52 pm / astrometry, astronomy, flickr

On the spot. Did you know Jupiter just grew a third spot? Apparently the spots are storms, and the largest has been raging for several centuries.

# 24th May 2008, 6:25 pm / astronomy, brian-hayes, jupiter