AAS Seeking Contract Software Developer for WorldWide Telescope

Project Summary

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is looking for a contract programmer to lead the software development activities of the WorldWide Telescope/Astrolabe project, funded by the National Science Foundation. WorldWide Telescope (WWT) provides a powerful data-visualization interface for data exploration and presentation. This project will enable the broader use of institutional and community-based, researcher-oriented astronomy data repositories and computational tools through the open source WWT visualization software systems. The Contract Software Developer will be a member of the project team that will engage the astronomy research community to define what is needed to make WWT an effective interface for data archives with linkages to data, software tools, and journal publications. WWT will be integrated with the University of Arizona (UA) Astrolabe data repository targeted at researchers with legacy data, mostly supporting scholarly articles. Astrolabe development has been informed by astronomy community workshops in 2015 and 2016 hosted at UA and is being built to provide dataset access using the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure at UA. This project will incorporate previously uncurated data, by creating a powerful WWT web-based front-end to be modularized for ease of connection to diverse astronomy data archives and computational tools. This will build on a WebGL Web Client that has been developed by the AAS over the last year. The project is a collaboration between researchers at University of Arizona and the American Astronomical Society; the anticipated contract duration would be two years for the Contract Software Developer.

The Contract Software Developer will need to interact with a geographically distributed group of users and developers, including volunteer open source programmers from all over the world. This project focuses on researchers in Arizona in order to enable in-person interactions and the Contract Software Developer would be encouraged to work periodically at the University of Arizona.

Desired Project Development Outcomes

• Implement new visualization functionality into Desktop and WebGL Web Client based upon community input
• Implement cloud-based services to process image, all-sky, and catalog data for display in WWT clients
• Install astronomy data processing software on CyVerse infrastructure at the University of Arizona and connect to Astrolabe repository and WWT
• Integrate the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) into Astrolabe and WWT
• Carry out software training to astronomy developers and users at various meetings and workshops
• Interact with research scientists to bridge between software and astronomy research communities
• Coordinate standards approval relevant to data integrated into WWT with appropriate organizations
• Manage open source contributors, including responding to direct developer inquires and pull-requests
• Execute official deployments of WWT Desktop and WebGL Web Client
• Manage community contributed content to website and community management of some parts of website (e.g., documentation, events)

Necessary Skill Sets

• 2+ years of programming C++
• 2+ years of programming Python
• 1+ years of programming JavaScript
• 2+ years of experience in astronomy software development
• Experience programming in open source environments
• The ability to learn C# and Visual Studio

• PhD in observational astronomy
• Experience implementing web design
• Experience with image processing algorithms
• Experience writing developer and user-level documentation
• Experience with GitHub

If you are interested in serving as a contractor for this project, please submit your CV, a letter of interest, and all programming certificates you have obtained to [email protected]. The letter of interest should include your experience programming and collaborating on similar projects and at least three business references.