Julia in Astronomy & Astrophysics Research 2025
A Mini-Symposium at JuliaCon 2025
Thursday, July 24, 2025 (Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Main Room 4
Goals
This minisymposium aims to provide researchers in astronomy and astrophysics an opportunity to share how Julia has enhanced their science and the challenges they see to broader adoption. We aim to:
- raise awareness of Julia programming patterns and packages that are particularly useful for astronomical research,
- identify opportunities for new/upgraded packages that could accelerate the adoption of Julia among the astronomical research community, and
- help strengthen the community.
Schedule
- 14:00 Building an Astronomy Code for VLBI in Julia (Paul Tiede)
- 14:30 Instrument Modelling for Radio Telescopes with Julia (Iniyan Natarajan)
- 14:40 Bayesian Multifrequency Imaging for Radio Astronomy (TBC)
- 14:50 Regularized Maximum Likelihood Methods for Black Hole Imaging (Andy Nilipour)
- 15:00 Space time and accretion inference from images of black holes (TBC)
- 15:30 Building an End-to-End Spectral Reduction Pipeline for APOGEE (Andrew Saydjari)
- 15:40 Juggling astro catalogs in Julia: convenience meets performance (Alexander)
- 15:50 ScatteringOptics.jl: An Interstellar Scattering Framework (Anna Tartaglia)
- 16:00 Astrometry.jl: A Fundamental Julia Package for Astronomy (TBC)
- 16:10 Panel Discussion
Posters
- Comrade.jl: A Modern Black Hole Imaging Code (TBC)
Rationale
This mini-symposium aims to bolster the community of Julia developers and users specializing in astronomy and astrophysics research and builds on the fully virtual Mini-symposium on Julia in Astronomy & Astrophysics Research at JuliaCon 2022. At the time of the proposal for the 2022 mini-symposium, just over 30 papers in the astronomy & astrophysics literature included “Julia” and “Bezanson et al. (2017)”. As of late 2024, that list has grown to over 190 publications. As the use of Julia has grown, it’s increasingly difficult for researchers to stay abreast of new tools becoming available. This mini-symposium aims to address that challenge.
This mini-symposium invites researchers and developers developing packages particularly relevant to the astronomical community and researchers applying Julia to astronomical research problems to share their experiences through a series of short contributed talks. The talks will be followed by a short panel discussion to consider big picture questions about the growth of Julia among the astronomical community. We plan for panelists to be drawn primarily from speakers in this mini-symposium and hopefully a few speakers from other relevant sessions at JuliaCon 2025.
Speakers are asked not to emphasize the astronomical methods or conclusions, but rather how using Julia impacted their project.
- What Julia packages and programming patterns did they find were particularly helpful?
- What challenges related to Julia did they encounter, either logistical or technical? What work-arounds did they find?
- What additions or upgrades to the Julia package ecosystem would be helpful for their future projects? …or for accelerating adoption of Julia among the astronomical community?
- Where could filling a gap in documentation and or developing improved training materials be particularly impactful for helping astronomers to transition to Julia?
Organizing Committee
- Eric Ford (Penn State)
- Paul Barrett (GWU)
- Paul Tiede (CfA)