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.

[@paulwary]

Very entertaining and educational. Pity so few have watched.

[@Tritium21]

Great talk, I always love your talks that go very far afield to make points about software development. Only note - when given the choice of writing a function that takes a path to a file or a file object, choose the third option - just return the data instead. I am happy to call open and write myself, if it means I don't have to call io.TextIO to get the output as a string :D

[@leouieda]

Very small correction that WGS84 is not a "geoid" but is an "oblate ellipsoid". The geoid is an equipotential surface of the earth's gravity potential that best fits the oceans at rest.