Practical Python for Astronomers

https://python4astronomers.github.io/index.html

by blondie9x • 11 years ago

122 23 11 years ago

python4astronomers.github.io

kf5jak2• 11 years ago

Is this an event/meeting coming up? Or is it supposed to be all online. Can't really seem to get much information on "Practical Python for Astronomers" from the site. It may just be me missing something...

vruiz• 11 years ago

the first few links are just mostly references, you need to look a bit deeper. Like: https://python4astronomers.github.io/astropy/fits.html

CamperBob2• 11 years ago

No, they need to make it a bit clearer. On the surface, it looks like yet another "webinar"- or MOOC-like scheme to impose a realtime schedule on a presentation that has no inherent realtime requirement. (Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine.)

It's even worse when the "Location and time" columns are all "TBD."

kf5jak2• 11 years ago

Ah, I see, thanks!

napperjabber5• 11 years ago

How about the inverse? Practical astronomy tools for python-developers? Just getting into astronomy I'd love some tips on where to look for stuff like this.

privong2• 11 years ago

What type of things are you interested in doing? There's a pretty wide range of things in astronomy that lend themselves to the use of python (simulation analysis, data calibration, data display, etc.). The astropy[0] effort is creating a general-purpose package to aid in many areas. There are codes to compute how radiation transfers through gas (e.g., powderday[1]), fitting codes to observations of interstellar gas tracers (e.g., pyradexnest[2]), and so on. Many are fairly specialized (the last two, for example) and perhaps not as useful to a casual/amateur astronomer, but things like astropy would be useful for calibrating images from CCD cameras, or computing when things are visible in the sky.

If you reply with more specifics of what you're after, I can try to provide more relevant examples.

[0] http://www.astropy.org/

[1] http://powderday.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[2] https://github.com/jrka/pyradexnest

napperjabber5• 11 years ago

Quick Reply: I'm currently studying orbital-mechanics. Starting with something like Celestial Objects then downsizing to small-bodies later on. This has me reading up on Newtonian physics. With a solid understanding there, I'll move onto General Relativity.

My current open question (that may have been answered by this thread) was where can I obtain star-charts? How do I interact with them. Etc.

iandanforth• 11 years ago

Normally I would rail against "import *" in the code, but under the circumstances ...

jmspring• 11 years ago

Working for an astronomy company while in grad school was the first place I got to play with Fortran. It seems like Python is becoming the common language for researchers in a variety of fields -- ML, etc.

I still have the Fortran Coloring Book around somewhere.

stargazer-32• 11 years ago

According to a recent study on the current usage of programming languages in astronomy -http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03989 - Fortran, quite popular in the old days, is still used by a quarter of scientists in the field. Python has been growing very fast in the last five years, eating away at the IDL share of astronomers.

Pandabob• 11 years ago

I'm starting my first Fortran (90/95) course tomorrow as part of my studies in astronomy. Having only used python and javascript before, I'm excited and terrified at the same time. The syntax just seems really different compared to those two languages.

theophrastus• 11 years ago

For easy python access to the VSOP87 (and ELP 2000) theory, that is, planetary/moon calculations, i've been impressed with the clean (ANSI C) implementation of this "kepler" library with nice python hooks: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/kepler

dstyrb• 11 years ago

Nothing really productive to say to anyone except professional astronomers in the room:

This is a similar tutorial we went through at ESA: http://python4esac.github.io/index.html

This is a more advanced machine learning focused module, go through the "book figures" and example code is given. I also have a collection of slides on the module if anyone is interested: http://www.astroml.org

This is a padova isochrone query tool for python: https://github.com/jonathansick/padova

MCMC library, arguably better than pymc, written by astronomers: https://github.com/dfm/emcee

Lifesaver on how to make fancy plots: http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html

Not python specific, tools of the trade: http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr (star chart with survey data overlays), http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/ (table manipulation and quick visualization for CSV, FITS, VOTable, IPAC, etc.), http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html (CCD image visualization), http://iraf.noao.edu (a house of cards build by grad students for grad students where no one really knows how it works but everyone seems to know about)

Please cite these resources if you use them.

Finally, a fun link for grad students: http://astrobites.com

Practical Python for Astronomers

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