MOCpy

[ManonMarchand]

Submitting Author: (@ManonMarchand)
All current maintainers: (@fxpineau, @tboch, @bmatthieu3, @ManonMarchand)
Package Name: MOCPy
One-Line Description of Package: MOCPy allows to read/write, and create Multi-Order Coverage Maps
Repository Link: https://github.com/cds-astro/mocpy
Version submitted: 0.17.1
EiC: (@coatless, @eliotwrobson)
Editor: @crhea93
Reviewer 1: @TOCode11
Reviewer 2: @ChristianThibeault
Archive: TBD
JOSS DOI: TBD
Version accepted: TBD
Date accepted (month/day/year): TBD

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Description

MOCPy is a python package that allows the manipulation of Time-Space Multi-Order Coverage maps. These maps are defined by an International Virtual Observatory standard (https://ivoa.net/documents/MOC/20220727/index.html).

Concretely, time and space (on the sky sphere) are described by cells of different coarseness, and a MOC is an ensemble of these cells.

Here are three MOCs (plotted with MOCPy) describing regions of the sky :

This format is particularly useful to perform operations (union, difference, ...) on time and space regions.

Here is the union of the previous MOCs:

Typical uses of the library are:

• estimation of telescopes field of view (uses space information)
• knowing if a satellite has observed a short-lived event in the sky (uses time and space information)

Scope

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  Check out our package scope page to learn more about our
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  • Data retrieval
  • Data extraction
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Domain Specific

• Geospatial
• Education

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We were an astropy-affiliated package with the former system (pre-2024).

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  • Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

The audience is astronomers. From a quick scanning of the libraries that use MOCPy on github, we identify three major poles:

1. time-dependent astronomy fields (gravitational waves, transients, multi-messenger...).
2. big astronomical databases. They either cross-match astronomical catalogs between each other, or they are building and interrogating databases indexed with the HEALPix tesselation (the one used for MOC space cells).
3. telescope crew that use MOCPy to calculate field of view and plan observations

• Are there other Python packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ?

There is pymoc (https://github.com/grahambell/pymoc), a pure python implementation. It works, but the API is more minimal (no creation of MOCs from shapes, no check to see if a sky-coordinate falls within a MOC, only Space-MOCs no Time-MOCs, no plotting utilities, no multi-threading, ...)

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Footnotes

1. Please fill out a pre-submission inquiry before submitting a data visualization package. ↩

[lwasser]

Hey everyone! 👋🏻 i'm checking in on packages that need to move forward. it looks like this is an astropy package but also it needs pre-review checks. we will followup on next steps soon.

[hamogu]

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Editor comments

Hi,
thanks to much for submitting the package and the apologize that it's taken us so long to get to it. PyOpenSci is too successful, and we're getting more submission right now than we can handle simultaneously, so it's been a bit of a delay. I've looked at your package and it's in pretty good shape - not surprisingly since it's been around for a while and has been astropy-affilated for a while, too. However, for PyOPenSci, we ask you to add a few more "housekeeping" files that don't have much to do with code, but with the community working on it and hopefully helping you to maintain it, e.g. a Code of conduct (see list above where tick marks are missing). Let me know know if you need any pointers with suggestions or examples!

When I looked at the package docs, I also noticed a few small things that could be fixed - I've opened issues and PRs for you since that's probably easier to keep track for you than me just writing it down here.

Please let me know when you've added the files so I can tick off the boxes below and we'll get busy looking for reviewers. (Though I already want to caution that August is a time when many potential reviewers are on vacation and we might have to wait for people to get back to work before we find reviewers.)