AstroLib? Project Page

http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/astroliblogo.png

Astrolib is an astronomical utility library for Python analogous to the ASTRON library for IDL. There's a (mostly inactive) wiki that includes discussion of its design philosophy, requirements, envisioned components, etc.

Astrolib presently has five active components:

- asciidata , for managing some commonly used file formats

- pysynphot, an intended replacement for synphot

Pysynphot is a synthetic photometry software package suitable for either library or interactive use. Intended as a modern-language successor to the IRAF/STSDAS synphot package, it provides improved algorithms that address known shortcomings in synphot, and its object-oriented design is more easily extensible than synphot's task-oriented approach. Written in Python, it will run under PyRAF, and a backwards compatibility mode is provided that will recognize all spectral and throughput tables, obsmodes, and spectral expressions used by synphot, to facilitate the transition for legacy code.

Features:

  • no IRAF dependencies
  • improved precision arithmetic
  • improved handling of wavelength sampling
  • extensive graphics capabilities available using matplotlib/pylab

Documentation:

(Formerly known as specman -- earlier tagged versions have not been renamed.)

- coords , for managing astronomical coordinate systems (http://www.scipy.org/AstroLibCoordsHome)

  • Current release v0.3 (12 Feb 2007)
  • Previous release v0.25 (25 Jan 2007)

- tfit , for photometry of mixed-resolution data sets (a software project by the GOODS team)

- pywcs

pywcs is a set of routines for handling the FITS World Coordinate System (WCS) standard. It is a thin wrapper around the high- and mid-level interfaces of Dr. Mark Calabretta's WCSLIB.

pywcs is currently alpha-quality software. The current version is focused on providing basic access to the functionality in WCSLIB. Future releases will have better integration with PyFITS and more Python-specific utilities.