pylanetary 0.1.0

data processing and modeling tools for ring, moon, and planet observations

data processing and modeling tools for ring, moon, and planet observations

Installation

pip install pylanetary (Python 3.9 to 3.12)

Features

• Navigation and re-projection for solar system imaging observations (makes use of Cartopy); Nav Tutorial and example workflow.

• Read/write navigated solar system images and backplanes in the NAV multi-extension fits format, originally developed for the HST OPAL program.

• Easy access to solar system body static data (radius, mass, etc.) and ephemerides; Body Tutorial.

• Utilities for solar-system-specific unit conversions like I/F; Units Tutorial.

• Ring-moon system modeling and model-data comparison; Rings Tutorial.

• (coming soon) Compute Doppler winds from image cubes and compare with simulation output (e.g. EPIC).

Usage

See our readthedocs page

Scope and Goal

The idea behind pylanetary is to bring solar system science tools into the open-source Python 3 / Astropy ecosystem. We, and many of our colleagues, rely heavily on useful code snippets passed down from other solar system scientists. But these pieces of code are untested, in multiple languages, closed-source, and have many untracked dependencies. We want to fix that. The eventual goal is to become Astropy-affiliated, but that is a long way off. We would love your help developing it! See Contributing.

Disclaimer

Pylanetary is developed and maintained by a small group of scientists. Most of us are not primarily software engineers, and we do not get paid to do this. While we do our best, there is no guarantee that every function works as intended. Use these tools with caution, and ensure that what you’re getting out makes sense. If you do discover a problem, please help us out by submitting an issue on our issues page, or fix it yourself! See Contributing.

License

This project is Copyright (c) Edward Molter & Chris Moeckel and licensed under the terms of the GNU general public license. This package is based upon the Astropy package template which is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license. See the licenses folder for more information.

Contributing

We love contributions! Pylanetary is open source, built on open source, and we’d love to have you hang out in our community. Please read the contribution page before you start.

Imposter syndrome disclaimer: We want your help. No, really.

There may be a little voice inside your head that is telling you that you’re not ready to be an open source contributor; that your skills aren’t nearly good enough to contribute. What could you possibly offer a project like this one?

We assure you - the little voice in your head is wrong. If you can write code at all, you can contribute code to open source. Contributing to open source projects is a fantastic way to advance one’s coding skills. Writing perfect code isn’t the measure of a good developer (that would disqualify all of us!); it’s trying to create something, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. That’s how we all improve, and we are happy to help others learn.

Being an open source contributor doesn’t just mean writing code, either. You can help out by writing documentation, tests, or even giving feedback about the project (and yes - that includes giving feedback about the contribution process). Some of these contributions may be the most valuable to the project as a whole, because you’re coming to the project with fresh eyes, so you can see the errors and assumptions that seasoned contributors have glossed over.

Note: This disclaimer was originally written by Adrienne Lowe for a PyCon talk, and was adapted by pylanetary based on its use in the README file for the MetPy project.

Logo Credit

Our logo was designed by graphic designer Jacob Waliszewski. Check out his website at https://www.jwdesignco.com/.