Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Scoring and Scheduling Constraints

My work during the last two weeks has been on writing a separate scorer as well as writing the scheduling constraints that will allow a scheduler to group blocks together. I also would really like to see the features included in Stuart Littlefair's work be able to be merged into the astroplan master, and so I've been trying to work on finding the issues preventing the package template update from being merged. There are still some issues left that I am not sure how to fix, which may partially result from my attempt at fixing it.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Update in direction

A large portion of the work I have done so far has been improving and fixing bugs with the schedulers that are currently in Astroplan. From conversations with mentors and from feedback on my straw-man API that I wrote for how a user should be able to interact with the schedulers, where conversation is still ongoing and feedback welcome, we have realised there a some things that the current schedulers really cannot support. The most common part is allowing a user to designate multiple observing blocks that need to observed consecutively or during the same night. Looking forward I will be working on making the code reflect the straw-man API and making the scheduling more extensible.