Astropysics: astrophysics utilities for python

Author:Erik Tollerud

Astropysics is a library containing a variety of utilities and algorithms for reducing, analyzing, and visualizing astronomical data. Best of all, it encourages the user to leverage the existing capabilities of Python to make this quick, easy, and as painless as cutting-edge science can even actually be. There do exist other Python packages with some of the capabilities of this project, but the goal of this project is to integrate all these tools together and make them interact in the most straightforward ways possible.

(And to that end, if you are running one of those other projects, I’d love to help integrate our projects into a common framework!)

Quick Install

See Installing Astropysics for full install instructions, including prerequisite packages.

To install a current release of astropysics, the simplest approach is:

pip install astropysics

(on unix-like systems or OS X, add “sudo ” before this command)

If you want the must up-to-date (possible unstable) version, do:

hg clone https://astropysics.googlecode.com/hg/ astropysics-dev
cd astropysics-dev
python setup.py develop

(note that mercurial must be installed, and on some systems the last command may need to have “sudo ” at the beginning)

You can also alter the source code if you use this approach (see Developer Guidelines for Astropysics for guidelines of working contributing source code).

In either case, afterwords you can run:

astpys-setup

to install optional packages and setup the environment.

Bug Reports

The best place to report bugs is via the google code bug tracker. That way they won’t be forgotten unless an asteroid impact destroys all of google’s servers.

Logo Image Credit

The multiwavelength image of M81 was put together by the folks at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/m81/), and they credit: “X-ray: NASA/CXC/Wisconsin/D.Pooley & CfA/A.Zezas; Optical: NASA/ESA/CfA/A.Zezas; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J.Huchra et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA”. The Python logo can be found at http://www.python.org/community/logos/.

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