Cycle 5:Accessible stellar photometry

finance/proposal-calls/cycle5/craig-photometry.md

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+### Accessible stellar photometry
+
+### Project Team
+Matt Craig will lead the project. Additional participants are from two members of the Astronomy/STEM Alliance with Lick Observatory (ASTRAL), collaborators from others in the upper Midwest who work primarily with undergraduates, and members of the AAVSO.
+
+### Project Description / Scope of Work
+This project will focus on a package called stellarphot, which is intended to be
+an easy-to-use tool for performing aperture astronomy on a set of images. It is
+written to be run either by a script or via a Jupyter notebook-based interface.
+
+This proposal will do three things:
+
+1. Work with users at primarily undergraduate institutions to improve the
+   usability and accessibility of the stellarphot package.
+2. Develop a workshop and tutorials for the package.
+3. Add two features to improve performance of the package: i) calibration using
+   an ubercal-style approach that minimizes changes in magnitude across several
+   images over many nights and ii) add the ability to work with and save postage
+   stamps of images rather than full images.
+
+#### Roadmap Items
+These roadmap items will be addressed:
+
++ "🟥 Expand and build on workshop offerings, including online and increased
+  geographic coverage" will be addressed by developing a workshop targeted to
+  smaller observatories/institutions that do stellar photomtery and integrating
+  techniques for processing images from smart telescope developed by the AAVSO.
++ "🔶 Develop, host, and index tutorials suitable for use in university
+  astronomy courses" will be addressed by creating shorter notebooks in additon
+  to the workshop materials and embedding video help into the notebooks that the
+  package provides.
++ "🟥 Improve support for using Astropy tools in heterogeneous computing
+  environments such as cloud environments or GPU systems" will be addressed by
+  ensuring that it is Array API compliant and by building out the option in
+  `ccdproc` and `stellarphot` to convert full frame images into postage stamp
+  cutouts around stars instead of keeping full images.
+
+#### Project / Work / Deliverables
+
+1. More extensive documentation and tutorials.
+2. WOrkshop materials.
+3. Improvement of the calibration and postage stamp features.
+
+### Approximate Budget
+Currency: US $4,500 - $9,000
+
+
+- Salary
+    - Project lead: $0 - $1,000
+    - Additional team members who will help with software development and testing: $4,500 - $8,000
+- TOTAL: $4,500 - $9,000
+
+*Note*: if funded at the lower end of the range the funding will be directed to the additional team members rather than the project lead.
+
+### Period of Performance
+
+The period of performance is Jan 1, 2026–Dec 31, 2026.