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.