From Photons to Power Spectra: Journey with Stingray.jl
From Photons to Power Spectra: Journey with Stingray.jl The final week of Google Summer of Code is here. As I sit back and look at the codebase, it feels surreal. Three months ago, I was an undergraduate with a deep fascination for black holes, neutron stars, and the extreme physics of the cosmos. I knew I wanted to write code that would help decode the universe, but I never imagined the ride would be this thrilling. When I started my journey with Stingray.jl under the OpenAstronomy umbrella, the mission was clear: take the powerful spectral-timing capabilities of the Python Stingray library and bring them to the Julia ecosystem. Python is fantastic, but when you are dealing with millions of X-ray photons and computing averaged cross-spectra over thousands of segments, the blazing speed of Julia becomes a game-changer. This is the story of how we built a high-performance spectral timing engine, the promises we kept, the fun we had, and where we go from here. What was Promised vs. What...