The Rustronomy Project - an astrophysics toolkit written in Rust

Rustronomy is an astrophysics Rust project aimed at providing astrophysicists with the tools needed to perform lightning-fast statistical analysis and computational modelling, powered by the Rust programming language. Rust makes low-level programming accessible to non-computer scientists. Over the last few years more and more scientific computing tools written in rust have popped up: we can now make very nice plots with plotters, perform lightning-fast array calculations using ndarray and even write Rust code in Jupyter notebooks since the introduction of a rust kernel by google.

Rustronomy crates build upon the currently existing, frequently used crates in the Rust ecosystem to provide a standardised toolset for astronomy. This way, all crates in the Rustronomy ecosystem are interoperable with each other and with external crates using the same dependencies as the Rustronomy project. Another key goal of Rustronomy is interoperability of Rustronomy crates with Python and its extensive existing scientific computing ecosystem. It is already quite easy to create Python bindings for Rust crates, and Rustronomy crates with unique capabilities are encouraged to also include Python bindings.

Organisation

Rustronomy is a collection of interoperable crates from many different fields. Any crate that is reasonably well maintained, followes the [guidelines]() and is interoperable with the other crates can be added as a rustronomy crate.

Crates that are currently part of the rustronomy ecosystem

• rustronomy-core
  
  common dependency, enables interoperability between rustronomy crates (source is in this repo).
• rustronomy-fits
  
  utility for reading and writing FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files.
• rustronomy-watershed
  
  a pure rust implementation of the segmenting and merging watershed algorithms.

Planned Features

Currently, the crates listed above are not finished yet, so any work on future expansions is postponed until those are finished (barred from the asdf crate since not that many people use asdf files yet). If anyone wishes to contribute code for these projects, feel free to do so if you are prepared to maintain your own Rustronomy component. Sugessted Features:

• data analysis tools (sampling, baysian analysis etc...)
• spectroscopy tools
• high-contrast imaging tools
• star-field tools (calculating star fluxes from a field etc...)
• stellar evolution tools / bindings to MESA
• ...and many more crates

License

All crates in the Rustronomy ecosystem are licensed under the EUPLv1.2 (or higher) license.

Rustronomy is explicitly not licensed under the dual Apache/MIT license common to the Rust ecosystem. Instead it is licensed under the terms of the European Union Public License v1.2.

Rustronomy is a science project and embraces the values of open science and free and open software. Closed and paid scientific software suites hinder the development of new technologies and research methods, as well as diverting much- needed public funds away from researchers to large publishing and software companies.

See the LICENSE.md file for the EUPL text in all 22 official languages of the EU, and LICENSE-EN.txt for a plain text English version of the license.