From Erik Tollerud, Thomas Robitaille, and Perry Greenfield on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration:We are very happy to announce the second major public release (v0.3) of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy: http://www.astropy.orgAstropy is a community-driven package intended to contain much of the core functio... View More
The last year has seen tremendous progress in multi-platform scientific Python package installations. It's getting easier and easier for users to get up and running with a full-featured Python installation in minutes. There is perhaps a healthy competition between big hitters Anaconda (from Continuum Analytics) and Canopy (from... View More
Brian Kent has published an interesting paper describing the use of Blender and Python to do 3D graphics for astronomy. This includes Python scripts and examples:http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3481http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~bkent/computing/kentPASP.html
View MoreFrom the Astropy Collaboration:We are happy to announce the release of v0.2.2 of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy. v0.2.2 is a bug fix release, with 30+ bugfixes and performance enhancements. The full list of changes can be found at http://docs.astropy.org/en/v0.2.2/changelog.html#id1 Instructions for instal... View More
We are planning to have an Astronomy & Astrophysics Mini-Symposium at the SciPy2013 conference in Austin, TX in June 2013. The use of Python for astronomy research is growing rapidly, and we have seen the emergence of large and well-organized community efforts to develop analysis packages for astronomy. I'm ... View More
Astropython reader Aycha shared the following:This matplotlib tutorial was useful to me and thought I should share. Other video lectures from that meeting might be of interest for astronomers as well:http://vimeo.com/53057312http://vimeo.com/continuumanalytics/videos
View MoreToday I gave an overview talk about performance Python at the CfA Code Coffee seminar. This reprises the venerable SciPy Performance Python page and also draws from the update in Speeding up Python. The new twist was presenting the material as an IPython notebook, which worked out very well. In addition it includes a section on Nu... View More
I just installed Numba and its dependencies for the first time, and everything built fine straight out of the box. In case you haven't heard of Numba, here's the blurb:Numba is an Open Source NumPy-aware optimizing compiler for Python sponsored by Continuum Analytics, Inc. It uses the remarkable LLVM compiler infrastructure... View More
There is a very nice paper that showed up on arXiv.org recently. This is well worth reading, either for yourself or as the basis for introducing these topics to your colleagues.Best Practices for Scientific ComputingAruliah, et al. Oct. 2012Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. Howeve... View More
Joshua Bloom from UC Berkeley gave a keynote talk at SciPy 2012 on "Python as Super Glue for the Modern Scientific Workflow". It's now up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLuIB8aW2KA&feature=youtu.beThe talk from Fernando Perez on "IPython: tools for the entire lifecycle ... View More
Matt Davis has written up some notes on issues the Python user might encounter when upgrading to Mountain Lion on MacOS:http://penandpants.com/2012/07/28/upgrading-to-mountain-lion/
View MoreThis is a little off-topic, but if you aren't already using a modern version control system like git or mercurial for your coding and research, then you should take 15 minutes to check it out!http://try.github.com/
View MorePython isn't only for astronomy...For any hardware hackers out there this looks way cool. Like Arduino, but 25 timesfaster and runs linux and Python natively with NumPy and SciPypre-installed:http://rascalmicro.com/http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/13/rascal-micro-hands-on-video/
View MoreThe "How to think like a Computer Scientist" books (web based or physical) have long been a recommended starting place for scientists learning to code. The "strange history of this book" just got a bit more awesome with this interactive, javascript driven, video laced edition of the Python book. Take... View More
Registration is now open for SciPy 2012. If you want to submit an abstract for a talk or poster the deadline is Monday April 30.http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2012/SciPy 2012, the eleventh annual Scientific Computing with Python conference, will be held this July 16-21 in Austin, Texas. SciPy is a community dedicated to the advanc... View More