AstroPAL Coding Workshop

This repository serves as the record of the current and past records of files used for the AstroPAL coding workshops.

Installation

To copy this repository onto your machine, simply run:

git clone https://github.com/imedan/AstroPAL_Coding_Workshop.git

If you do not have git installed on your machine, you can install it from here.

General Advice

Below is some general advice/resources we wanted to provide all of you in case you wanted to explore some more interesting packages/methods after the workshop!

Astronomy Python Packages

• Astropy: Large collection of software packages written in Python for astronomy

• Galpy: Python package for galactic dynamics

• Dustmaps: 2D/3D dust maps used to estimate reddening written in Python

• AstroML: Python machine learning/data mining package made specifically for astronomers

• Lightkurve: Python package for accessing and analyzing Kepler and TESS data

• Glue: Multidimensional data visualization tool written in Python. This was made by astronomers, so has a lot of things built in that are astronomy specific.

• Astrodendro: Python package for making dendrograms, specifically written in Python for applications within astronomy. (If you don’t know what dendrograms are, they are useful for identifying 2D features in images).

IDL Packages

• Homepage for everything astro IDL

• Short descriptions of each function

• Github for IDLAstro

• sym.pro: package for plotting

• Plotting with Latex language

• Curve Fitting

Random Advice

• Comment your code (just do it!)

• Give your variables appropriate names

• Backup everything (see Github discussion)

• Having trouble finding the error?

  • Print things out (brute force way)

  • Learn to use a debugger

• When first using a script, run it on a smaller, test dataset

• Don’t go editing your original data source

• Make your code easier to read with a linter