I'm a web developer at the Planetary Rings Node, part of the NASA Planetary Data System. Our tiny shop is devoted to archiving, cataloging, and distributing scientific data sets relevant to planetary ring systems. Our base of operations is the SETI Institute, where a research community is busy searching for and studying life in the universe.

At the Rings Node I develop and maintain an outer planets space mission data search tool called OPUS which is built with Django. It lets users search data, browse images, and access its API via http. I'll talk about some of the reasons for OPUS, some of the challenges we faced in building it out and porting it - from a hot mess of php - to what it is today, and I'll talk a little about our plans for the future.

And we'll see some pretty pictures of the outer planets. :-D