Software Prize
The ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical Software is awarded every year at the annual conference. Eligible candidates are the developers of astronomical software ranging from those that have stood the test of time to those that are new and cutting edge. Depending on the software and the nomination, the award is given to either a group or an individual. Nominations can be for a single program, a package or a library. Nominations come from the ADASS community and are voted on by the Program Organizing Committee.
2020: William Pence for his work on CFITSIO, a library of subroutines for reading and writing FITS files. which has been used in countless astronomical software packages over two decades. It provides a de facto reference implementation of the FITS standard in addition to supporting common extensions used by the astronomical community. CFITSIO has proven to be both robust and portable, providing a stable code base for numerous projects across many operating systems and development languages. This award is presented in recognition of the outstanding contribution of CFITSIO to the astronomical software community and for Bill's efforts in leading the project since its inception. YouTube
2021: Doug Tody, Lindsey Davis and Frank Valdes for the design and development of the core IRAF system and science packages that have enabled almost 25,000 scientific papers since 1986. IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) is a software system developed originally by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (now NSF's NOIRLab) that has been extended by astronomers and institutions to provide a standard platform for data reduction and pipeline processing for numerous ground and space-based observatories. This award is presented in recognition of the outstanding contribution of IRAF to the astronomical software community and the key role these awardees had in developing the core system. YouTube
2022: The Astropy Project. Since its formal beginning in the Fall of 2011, the Astropy Project has been a community effort with the combination of institutional resources and many dedicated contributors. It has grown over the years and been used by many projects and individual astronomers. The first core astropy package release was version 0.2 in 2013. It is now at version 5.1. It is known to almost everyone involved in astronomy software development. This award is presented in recognition of the outstanding contribution of Astropy Project to the astronomical software community and the positive impact it has on many astronomy projects. The Astropy Project is made possible through the hard work of hundreds of people in the community. Please see team and credits for details.
2023: Alberto Accomazzi for the ADS Team. The ADS is a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics. The concept of ADS started in 1987. It has gone through many revisions over the years, from 40 papers as proof of concept in 1988 to more than 17 million records, 170M citations, and 700K articles in its full-text archive today; from scanned images of papers to online editions; from simple web user interface searches to sophisticated web UI and APIs. ADS now has agreements with almost all astronomical journals, who supply abstracts. Integrated in its collections, the ADS provides access and pointers to a wealth of external resources, including electronic articles available from publishers' websites, astronomical object information, data catalogs and data hosted by external archives. The ADS currently have links to over 13.3 million records maintained by its collaborators. This award is presented in recognition of the outstanding contribution of the ADS to the astronomical software community and the positive impact it has on many astronomy projects and scientists. The ADS is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory under a NASA grant.
2024: William Joye and Eric Mandel for their contributions to SAOImageDS9 (ds9) SAOImageDS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible via XPA and SAMP. DS9 supports advanced features such as 2-D, 3-D and RGB frame buffers, mosaic images, tiling, blinking, geometric markers, colormap manipulation, scaling, arbitrary zoom, cropping, rotation, pan, and a variety of coordinate systems. This award is presented in recognition of the outstanding contribution of SAOImageDS9 to the astronomical software community and the positive impact it has on many astronomy projects and scientists. Currently, SAOImageDS9 is fully funded by the Chandra X-ray Science Center (CXC).
2025: Dr. Mark Calabretta for his contributions to wcslib. The WCS (World Coordinate System) library is a C library that implements the "World Coordinate System" (WCS) standard in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). It is a critical component of astronomy software. Any astronomer who ever worked with a FITS image would probably have used tools that incorporated WCSLIB in them. CFITSIO, many observatory pipelines, and image manipulation packages, e.g. the main Chandra CIAO analysis package, the Spizter data processing pipeline, the image mosaic engine Montage, and CASA for processing radio data integrated WCSLIB internally; Astropy.wcs wraps WCSLIB for Python use. WCSLIB has been used by the community for 30 years.
2026:
Aladin and Aladin Lite team at CDS
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to
visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries
from astronomical catalogs or databases, and interactively
access related data and information from the Simbad database,
the VizieR service, and other archives for all known sources in
the field.
Created in 1999, Aladin has become a widely-used VO tool capable
of addressing challenges such as locating data of interest,
accessing and exploring distributed datasets, visualizing
multi-wavelength data. Key features are compliance with existing
and emerging VO standards, interconnection with other
visualization and analysis tools, and ability to easily compare
heterogeneous data, making Aladin a powerful data exploration
and integration tool as well as a science enabler. It has been
integrated into tools like the APT proposal tool and interacts
seamlessly with VO compatible tools like TOPCAT.
Aladin Lite is a lightweight version of the Aladin Sky Atlas,
running in the browser to provide high performance visualization
of multi-resolution sky data. It allows one to display
progressive surveys (HiPS) and superimpose tabular (VOTable) and
footprint (STC-S/MOC) data. Aladin Lite requires JavaScript, and
relies on HTML5 canvas and WebGL (since v3) technology,
currently supported by any modern browser. Aladin Lite is easily
embeddable on a web page and can also be controlled through a
JavaScript API ipyaladin package.
Aladin has built a solid reputation through the implementation
of HiPS technology for global sky visualization, thanks both to
its HiPS generation feature (Aladin/HiPSgen) and its HiPS
visualization capabilities. As a result, its web-based version,
Aladin Lite has been adopted by many archives as a sky
visualization component within popular applications such as
ESASky, the ESO Science Archive portal, the ALMA Science
Archive, and the Fink broker.
For more information, please see https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/