Re:What kind of software do astronomers need? (Score 1)

Be careful with an offer like that! I am a professional astronomer, and yes, the state of our software is pretty atrocious. I can easily come up with a list of software needs that would make a *significant* impact on our field that could (with the direction of an astronomer) be written with no formal background in astrophysics. Astronomers are not good programmers, but we have a *huge* need for good software and ridiculous amounts of data to sort through.

Here's one example of something I am doing that is starving for CS/IT people.

http://trillianverse.org

If anyone is truly interested in this, please feel free to contact me (my address is at the bottom of that page). And before anyone asks, no, I have no money to pay anyone. :) But you can make a difference in the field.

Want another way to help? We have a fair amount of code written in Fortran and C, but coding techniques are at a very low level. Astronomers aren't trained in code optimization (let alone OO most of the time). We would love to have people who can take our code and make it run 10x faster - GPU acceleration, threading, etc. Gains like that are certainly possible. You can absolutely use your IT skills to make a very positive impact in the field. We would so welcome that!