astLib provides some tools for research astronomers who use Python.
- Documentation: https://astlib.readthedocs.io
- License: LGPL
- Authors: Matt Hilton & Steven Boada
- Installation:
pip install astLib
- Support: Please use the GitHub issues page, and/or contact Matt Hilton.
astLib is divided into several modules:
- astCalc (general calculations, e.g. luminosity distance etc.)
- astCoords (coordinate conversions etc.)
- astImages (clip sections from .fits etc.)
- astPlots (provides a flexible image plot class, e.g. plot image with catalogue objects overlaid)
- astSED (calculate colours, magnitudes from stellar population models or spectral templates, fit photometric observations using stellar population models etc.)
- astStats (statistics, e.g. biweight location/scale estimators etc.)
- astWCS (routines for using FITS World Coordinate System information)
The astWCS module is a higher level interface to PyWCSTools, a simple SWIG (http://www.swig.org) wrapping of some of the routines from WCSTools by Jessica Mink (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/). It is used by some routines in astCoords, astImages and astPlots.
The goal of astLib was to provide features useful to astronomers that are not included in the scipy (http://scipy.org), numpy (http://numpy.scipy.org) or matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net) modules on which astLib depends. For a far more extensive set of Python astronomy modules, see astropy (http://www.astropy.org/).
Some scripts using astLib can be found in the examples/ folder provided with the source code distribution.