Asra Nizami:Developing the WCSAxes Framework for plotting Astronomical Images

###Project Proposal Information:

Title: Astropy: Developing the WCSAxes Framework for plotting Astronomical Images

Abstract: Plotting Astronomical images is an essential part of research in Astronomy and this project is designed to develop a new framework to plot Astronomical images in world coordinate systems (WCS). Although there are packages capable of plotting Astronomical images such as APLpy, we want to develop a package that can be completely integrated with Astropy. A basic implementation of the new framework, WCSAxes already works but a lot more work still needs to be done on this before it can be released.

Proposed Project Timeline:

Community Bonding Period April 21 - May 18:
Experiment with the existing WCSAxes implementation and work on integrating extra features. My mentor, Tom already has suggestions for features that can be implemented. Read literature on curvilinear coordinates and projections. Interact with other GSoC students and mentors for the project.
Week 1 May 19- May 25:
Write the documentation for the existing features of the WCSAxes
June 2 -- June 8 (1 week):
Begin to implement support for non-pixel coordinate systems and study the "Integration with astropy.wcs and astropy.coordinates" section in the API.
Week 2 May 26 - June 1:
Write a testing framework for the package.
Week 3 June 2 - June 8:
Continue work on tests. I'm setting aside two weeks (weeks 2 and 3) for this in case there are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed.
Week 4 June 9 - June 15:
Read documentation of NDData. Start writing code that will allow WCSAxes to produce plots of NDData.
Week 5 June 16 - June 22:
Write tests to check if WCSAxes works with NDData objects.
Week 6 June 23 - June 29:
Write documentation for the new code and do more tests/fix bugs if required.
Week 7 June 30 - July 6:
Read documentation of the APLpy package and experiment with it to understand how it works.
Week 8 and 9 July 7 - July 20 (2 weeks):
Start writing code that will integrate APLpy with WCSAxes.
Week 10 July 21 - July 27:
Test the new code and see if sample old APLpy scripts still work on this version of WCSAxes.
Week 11 July 28 - August 3:
Finish up with testing/fix bugs and write documentation.
Week 12 August 4 - August 10:
Buffer week in case other tasks take longer than anticipated. If there is time, work on adding more features, clean up code and enhance user experience.
August 11:
Suggested pencil down date. Make sure everything looks good and work on cleaning up code and fixing documentation throughout the week!
August 18:
Firm pencil down date. Upload the code!

###Patch/Code Sample: I worked on issue #2029 and refactored some repeated code. The link for the pull request is: https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/2219