On March 4-6, 2024, researchers from Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the Flatiron Institute, and Argonne National Laboratory, who collaborate with Wright Lab assistant professor Laura Newburgh’s group, gathered at Wright Lab to participate in a Simons Observatory (SO) “hackathon”.
The SO telescopes in Chile are currently in a commissioning phase, in which the group is working on calibrating the instrument and testing out all of the pipeline and analysis codes.
During commissioning, issues with the data reduction and processing pipeline code used to take raw telescope data and process it into maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) that can be used for cosmological analyses were found, and the Yale hackathon was an effort to focus on identifying and executing key fixes to the code.
Mossman Fellow Max Silva-Feaver, who coordinated the hackathon at Yale, said, “The hackathon took place over three days and was quite collaborative, with members working both individually and in small groups on targeted coding projects. About 10 new github pull requests to SO’s main pipeline repository were added and overall it seemed to be a huge success!”