About the AstroPython site

Research in astronomy includes the analysis of astronomical images, parsing and manipulation of large catalogs, statistical yet often visual inference, and the creation of data visualizations for publication and dissemination of results.

The purpose of this web site is to act as a community knowledge base for performing this research with the open source Python language. It provides a forum for general discussion, advice, or relevant news items, collecting lists of useful resources, users' code snippets or scripts, and longer tutorials on specific topics. The topics within these pages are presented in a list view with the ability to sort by date or topic. A traditional "blog" view of the most recently posted topics is visible from the site Home page.

Contributing to AstroPython

Readers are encouraged to submit comments to the topics on this site by clicking the "Add a comment..." link at the bottom of a posting. Normally a topic will be closed for comments after 60 days. If you have a particular resource or some content that would be of interest to the community please send an email via the Contact link and we will post the material as appropriate. Likewise any suggestions on the organization or content of this site are welcome via the same link.

Those who are interested in regularly contributing to the AstroPython site with privilege to post new entries to any of the site categories should send an email via the Contact link. It would be helpful to include a few sentences of introduction describing your interest in python and where you work. We will create an astropython.org google user account for you which will allow you to log in to the site and post content.

The AstroPython team

Thomas Robitaille is a Spitzer postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He works on studying Galactic star formation, mostly through mid-infrared to mm wavelengths. This includes modeling multi-wavelength observations of young stars and studying the global properties of star formation in the Milky-Way. In his spare time he is a keen Python programmer and is one of the co-developers of the APLpy and ATpy packages. He also developed the IDLSave package.

August (Gus) Muench is an Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and is on the User Support team for the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory. His science focuses on studies of star formation in our local Galaxy, using archival, broad spectrum (from X-ray to mid-IR) surveys. Gus made the switch from IDL to Python about 5 years ago after a VO summer school.

Eli Bressert is a PhD student at the University of Exeter / ESO and works on clustering of forming stars in the Milky Way. In the last two years he lead two mapping projects, MIPSGAL/GLIMPSE and Sky Interactive Database, to showcase potential uses of mapping services for science like Google Sky, WorldWide Telescope, and SkyMap. For three years Eli has been actively using Python and is a co-developer of the APLpy and ATpy packages.

Tom Aldcroft is a Science Operations Team member and Flight Director for the Chandra X-ray Observatory and works at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He uses Python for Chandra spacecraft operations analysis as well as research on several X-ray survey projects. He is the author of the asciitable, cosmocalc, and deproject packages. He is also interested in Python for the web and writes Django and Google App Engine applications for presenting large multi-wavelength survey datasets. He has been the lead in adapting the bloog GAE blog software to run the AstroPython site.

Prasanth Nair has a masters degree in astronomy and is an avid follower of Python and its usage in astronomy. He writes about astronomy and software in his Comfort at 1 AU blog.

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