Colloquium: Dr. Matthew Craig
Dr. Matthew Craig Department of Physics and Astronomy Minnesota State University Moorhead Moorhead, MNPython for Astronomy
This talk will provide an overview of the tools now available in Python for doing the day-to-day tasks of an astronomer. Two of the languages/tools very popular in the past, IRAF and IDL, had in common the feature that most of the software useful for astronomers came from one or two large organizations. The development of Python tools for doing astronomy is much more distributed, but a considerable amount of essential infrastructure, like support for astronomical times and coordinates, is provided by the astropy package, and the broader Astropy project seeks to provide a library of well-test Python-based tools. As an example of what is available in Python, and what still needs to be developed, we will walk through reduction and transformation to the standard magnitude system of optical/IR CCD images on a frame-by-frame basis.