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"First draft for the blog post for Brigitta" #10

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@gyssellperez gyssellperez Oct 30, 2025

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Really nice work. It flows very well and I like the meaningful advice given. I think my main advice would be to really make sure you can clearly answer the how, what and where as you read through this blog. Also I think it would be crucial to include what Brigitta enjoys most about the project and what undergrads can do to get there.

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Here's a figure if you'd like to keep it or change it!
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*Replace this text with a summary of your conversation*
Open-source tools permeate our lives, and few inspire more fear and frustration than the infamous Jupyter Notebook. But today, we are covering an open source tool that rather inspired growth and accessibility. Brigitta Sipocz is a researcher who built what she needed. Sipocz is an astronomer turned Research Software Engineer who has developed and contributed to a plethora of open source projects relating to research in astrophysics and cosmology. Her motivation sprouted from a personal need to access astro-datas, which started a grassroots movement that continuously grew in capacity. As she dipped her hands in software engineering, she saw the increasing importance of open source tools and its impact on society. Today we will focus on her prominent open source development called Astroquery.

@elletrinidad elletrinidad Oct 30, 2025

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I feel like the transition into Sicpocz's introduction could be a bit smoother. It sounds a lot like an announcer giving a speech and I think it would be cleaner to integrate her in more gradually.

@elletrinidad elletrinidad Oct 30, 2025

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There also could be a hyperlink to the site for Astroquery!


So what is Astroquery? Astroquery is an query tool that acts as a link between the user and various data center. If a researcher want to access a specific set of data, they can use the implemented API to query the data for their use. Think of it as a library but for astronomical data such as images, meta data, minor planets, other derived molecular data

@elletrinidad elletrinidad Oct 30, 2025

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I think a brief description about how Sicpocz built Astroquery could be helpful for students, especially because it is a complicated project and that itself is worth highlighting!


Astroquery is primarily geared towards graduate school researchers and general astrology researchers interested in identifying trends from previous data. The tool has been cited in over 200 research papers and have secured itself internationally with linkages to various data centers around the globe.

An overarching issue that exists in the world of open source development is maintenance. It is crucial to recognize the struggles of maintaining a project’s functionality, security, and commitment to reproducible research. Through an exclusive interview with Briggita Sipocz, we were able to uncover the unique struggles she faced to maintain AstroQuery. Through the iterations of AstroQuery spanning a decade, Sipocz dealt with problems such as keeping it from breaking, balancing upgrading efficiency with user utilization, and organizing her engineers. Sipocz specifically elaborates that a unique challenge that AstroQuery faces is that past versions of this project are not able to run due to dependency structures not being well-defined. This presents a unique challenge for the future development of this project, as it is being inhibited by the fact that users would always have to be updated that there are newer versions. This creates the issue of users having to always be updated, which is unreliable. This leads to inhibitions regarding the open, reliable sourcing of data.

@elletrinidad elletrinidad Oct 30, 2025

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I believe that a description about how this specifically can be useful for college students could be helpful. A lot of readers will be interested in her project, but they also want to be able to feel like it's applicable to them too! I think this will also help them empathize more with Sicpocz.


Although there were constant struggles, Brigitta’s passion enabled her to continuously improve Astroquery. On one side she unceasingly increase the data that Astroquery has access to by expanding to new databases. On the other she constantly improves the API of the open source tool to increase the efficiency. Through her work, Astroquery continues to evolve like the life-cycle of a butterfly.

“Go in with passion” is the advice that Brigitta gave to data science undergraduates. She reiterated the importance of motivation from personal need which then grew ever larger which eventually into Astroquery. Open source development as a whole is not an easy feat, but with the right motivations, the rewards are immense.