Astropy#

In this final chapter we introduce the Astropy package. In this module we only provide a bried introduction, but you will be making more use of the package later in the AST4007W course.

Astropy is an open-source and community-developed Python package. It contains core astronomy-related functionality. It was started in 2011 to bring together developers across the field of astronomy in order to coordinate the development of a common set of Python tools for astronomers.

The website can be found at https://www.astropy.org/, which also contains links to examples, tutorials and the documentation.

Supported File Formats#

Astropy provides support for domain-specific file formats such as:

  • Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files

  • Virtual Observatory (VO) tables

  • common ASCII table formats,

  • unit and physical quantity conversions

  • physical constants specific to astronomy

  • celestial coordinate and time transformations,

  • world coordinate system (WCS) support

  • e.t.c

We cover working with the FITS files in the final tutorial.