Opening internship positions

Screenshot Stellarium web

Students: we are opening internship positions

Students! We are opening several internship positions on technical, marketing and community management topics.

Where: Toulouse (France), or Taipei (Taiwan) or remotely Duration: 3 to 6 months When: starting from January 2020 Send applications to: [email protected]

Internship 1: Creation of a multi-resolution and HDR full sky survey

Goals of the internship: Our products related to night sky rendering (stellarium-web.org and apps Stellarium Mobile) currently display images from the full sky originating from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), a sky survey completed at the beginning of the 2000’s. In order to improve the realism of our products we would like to re-create our dataset (several hundreds of GB) based on more up-to-date data sets.

Main missions and responsibilities:

  • Make a review of the existing sky surveys and evaluate whether they match our needs.
  • Design and implement an image processing pipeline allowing to generate the wanted data.
  • Modify the rendering engine to integrate the new data set.
  • Develop the rendering code for seamlessly displaying HDR (High Dynamic Range) images within the rest of the sky simulation.

About you:

You are a student in Software development, Image processing or Astronomy with the following skills and qualifications:

Required skills:

  • Good level in Python and C on Linux
  • Understanding of basic astronomy concepts
  • Good level of English

Wished skills:

  • Qt, Web development, android/iOS programming
  • Interest in Astronomy and/or photography

Allowance: 600-1000 EUR / month

Internship 2: Implementation of soft drivers for telescope motors

Goals of the internship: Our mobile products related to sky rendering (Stellarium Mobile apps) allow to control telescopes using the simple LX200 and NexStar serial protocols. We would like to extend these capabilities to telescope mounts exposing only lower level motor control API, such as SynScan UDP protocol or PMC-Eight Mount System. Such low-level APIs require the app itself to implement a telescope mount physical model, and to deal with the procedures of mount alignment and calibration.

Main missions and responsibilities:

  • Perform a review of the existing low level protocols and define the execution plan
  • Design and implement a new class of soft driver (JavaScript) as well as the required I/O code (in C/C++)
  • Test and validate the code on real telescope hardware, in the lab and in the field
  • Contribute to the definition and implementation of the related GUI

About you: You are a student in Software development, Electronics, Astronomy with the following skills and qualifications:

Required skills:

  • Good level in C/C++ and JavaScript programming on linux
  • Experience with embedded systems
  • Good level of English

Wished skills:

  • Qt, Web development, android/iOS programming
  • Interest in Astronomy and/or embedded development

Allowance: 600-1000 EUR / month

Internship 3: Marketing or Community Manager assistant for web and mobile astronomy products Goals of the internship: We are looking for a candidate who will assist us at promoting our astronomy products on the web or in social medias. This includes increasing our visibility on app stores and search engines, as well as improving the quality of our editorial and visual content. The candidate will also engage with our clients, either by doing online support (less than 10% of the time) or by doing market studies with the ultimate goal of contributing to the definition of a strategical road map for our products.

Main missions and responsibilities:

Marketing manager: – plan and organize promotional campaigns on app stores, and other mediums – improve our products visibility in the app stores and perform SEO of our website – perform market studies and contribute to the definition of our marketing road-map

Community manager: – write news articles, updates and how-to on social networks and our mailing list – moderate our users forums, reply to clients requests – manage content on our website (word press) – optionally, write content related to astronomical observations or astronomical targets

Other tasks: – Write user’s documentation – Manage app and website translations

The job’s missions can be adapted depending on the profile of the candidate.