Open Heliophysics Python Development at the Smallest Scale: An Individual's Project Becomes Useful to Other Scientists

James's EVE Dimming Index (JEDI) catalog is a project to characterize solar coronal dimming in the entire history of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) data. The code to generate the catalog is all open source python available on GitHub (https://github.com/jmason86/James-s-EVE-Dimming-Index-JEDI) along with the resultant version-controlled catalog. It leverages many other open source python packages in heliophysics and beyond such as sunpy, scikit-learn, and pandas.

JEDI is an example of how even at the smallest scale - an individual researcher working on a project more or less alone - a small amount of additional effort to conform to standards and leverage existing modules can make the project more attractive to other developers and scientists. The open nature of JEDI has resulted in it being used for, to date, a semester-long graduate project in computer science, a high school summer intern project at NASA, a reference for researchers looking at phenomena related to dimming, and as the basis for two proposed NASA missions (a CubeSat and a Small Explorer). The small effort of posting the code to GitHub, keeping it active, and having a straightforward API has resulted in all of the above projects that were unsolicited by the author. In short, the paradigm of open source python in heliophysics leads to more usage and new opportunities.