About the Author

J. M. Hughes (John M. Hughes) is an embedded systems engineer with over 30 years ofexperience in electronics, embedded systems and software, aerospace systems, and scientific applications programming. He was responsible for the surface imaging software on the Phoenix Mars Lander, and has worked on digital engine control systems for commercial and military aircraft, automated test systems, radio telescope data acquisition, and real-time adaptive optics controls for astronomy. Hughes has been using Python for many years in a variety of applications. He is currently working on the software for a multi-wavelength laser interferometer system for verifying the alignment of telescope mirror segments, written mostly in Python.