Computing

Tips, tricks, and scripts

Some of my favorite packages:

Python library focused on general astronomy/astrophysics

For querying online astronomical resources. I am a contributor and helped implement and maintain the ephemeris query codes.

sbpy

Python library focused on small solar system objects. Best for comet and asteroid work. I co-founded this package along with Michael Mommert, Miguel de Val Borro, and Jian-Yang Li.

spiceypy

A must if you work with NAIF's SPICE toolkit.

synphot

Simulates photometric data and spectra.

pyds9

Display numpy arrays in SAOImage DS9. See tip below.

ginga

Python toolkit for astronomical image viewers.

pyds9 and iPython startup

Display numpy arrays in DS9. My favorite short-cut is to define a .view method for DS9, which I find easier to type for interactive work than .set_np2arr. I have an iPython profile named scipy. After initializing with ipython --profile=scipy, create the file .ipython/profile_scipy/startup/99-user.py (location for GNU/Linux systems) with the following content:

from importlib import reload

import scipy.ndimage as nd

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.pyplot import *

try:
    from astropy.io import fits, ascii
    from astropy.table import Table
    import astropy.units as u
    import astropy.constants as const
    from astropy.coordinates import Angle
    from astropy.time import Time
except ImportError:
    pass

try:
    from sbpy.data import *
    from sbpy.activity import *
except ImportError:
    pass

try:
    import pyds9
    pyds9.DS9.view = pyds9.DS9.set_np2arr
except ImportError:
    pass

try:
    import mskpy
    from mskpy import *
except ImportError:
    pass