Python in Astronomy¶

History

astronomy then - look through a telescope and sketch what you see on paper
astronomy now - have digital photos, colour, hubble ... - also x-ray, radio spectrums
1970 - FITS format - 1st successful cross-platform sharing - metadata and long term data storage
problems: big data, rich data - survey astronomy (lots of telescopes - 1 exabyte/day)

Python and astronomy

4 years ago still teaching fortran
now moving to python
if you want to use hubble data (or kepler, SKA ...) you need to use python
python can communicate with fortran!
many py packages for astronomy - PyFITS, PyWCS, astlib, CosmoPy ... (though so many it’s hard to navigate/choose)
make one package to rule them all - astropy (only required dependency is Numpy)
import cosmology :)
astropy is well tested, documented, community consensus as to what to include, cross platform, easy to install, python 3
nice units conversion, define own units
plot FITS files, combine images from different telescopes
machine learning - trying to find signal amongst the noise