astLib 0.12.0

A set of python modules for producing simple plots, statistics, common calculations, coordinate conversions, and manipulating FITS images with World Coordinate System (WCS) information

astLib provides some tools for research astronomers who use Python.

• Documentation: https://astlib.readthedocs.io

• License: LGPL

• Authors: Matt Hilton & Steven Boada

• Installation: pip install astLib

• Support: Please use the GitHub issues page, and/or contact Matt Hilton.

astLib is divided into several modules:

• astCalc (general calculations, e.g. luminosity distance etc.)

• astCoords (coordinate conversions etc.)

• astImages (clip sections from .fits etc.)

• astPlots (provides a flexible image plot class, e.g. plot image with catalogue objects overlaid)

• astSED (calculate colours, magnitudes from stellar population models or spectral templates, fit photometric observations using stellar population models etc.)

• astStats (statistics, e.g. biweight location/scale estimators etc.)

• astWCS (routines for using FITS World Coordinate System information)

The astWCS module is a higher level interface to PyWCSTools, a simple SWIG (http://www.swig.org) wrapping of some of the routines from WCSTools by Jessica Mink (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/). It is used by some routines in astCoords, astImages and astPlots.

The goal of astLib was to provide features useful to astronomers that are not included in the scipy (http://scipy.org), numpy (http://numpy.scipy.org) or matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net) modules on which astLib depends. For a far more extensive set of Python astronomy modules, see astropy (http://www.astropy.org/).

Some scripts using astLib can be found in the examples/ folder provided with the source code distribution.