Talks - Erik Tollerud: How Python is Behind the Science of the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the largest science projects in history. Its aim is to blow the door open on infrared astronomy: it has already found the earliest galaxies, will reveal the birth of stars and planets, and look for planets that could harbor life outside our solar system. Not to mention it has and will produce a lot of spectacular pictures that help us all understand our place in the cosmos in a way never before possible. And while there were many varied programming languages used for development and operation of JWST, the language used for most of the science is Python. In this talk I will walk through some of the early science of JWST and how it has been made possible by Python and the broad and deep open source Python scientific ecosystem.