Abstract: We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and
community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core
astronomy-related functionality to the community, including support for
domain-specific file formats such as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS)
files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit
and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy,
celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS)
support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular
data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions.
Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting
framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function
(PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions
and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested
to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.
This appears to be emerging as a really nice resource for astronomical computation with Python.
Building upon the success of existing Python libraries such as numpy, scipy, and matplotlib as astropy does is a Good Thing.
I note that the developers plan to add a generalised model-fitting library, presumably including polynomial, Fourier series, Loess etc.
They might need another package for analysis algorithms like Fourier analysis (e.g. DCDFT) and wavelet analysis (e.g. WWZ).
Here's the link to the project website: http://www.astropy.org
The arxiv.org link in the original post appears to be broken, so here it is again: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6212
David
I just saw this posted on another variable star forum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfhEOUWjVI&feature=youtu.be
See also http://python-in-astronomy.github.io/2016/
David
The Youtube channel for Python and astronomy is : "Python in Astronomy".
David