[AstroPy] Summer scholar

[Erik Tollerud]

Hello all,

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Joe Harrington <jh at physics.ucf.edu> wrote:
> Unless it's been done, I'd love to see this IDL/Matlab/FORTRAN code

As Rene said, PyWavelets does as much if not more as I think this
does... but it's probably true that it would be worthwhile to write
some wrappers or subclasses that deal with astronomy-specific
techniques - as Jonathan Slavin was asking about last week on this
list, there are some astronomy-centric tasks that could simply
PyWavelets as the base package, but phrased in a way that astronomers
are more likely to understand/use.

> Coord base class might be interesting

I'm not sure this is a useful way to go to start with, because
there're already a number of these in place (astropysics.coords,
pyephem, the astrolib coords module).  While it might be a good idea
to try to unify those systems somehow as has been discussed in
previous threads, that's more of a community task than an actual
summer project for an individual student.

> Something that I see as relatively important, in the view of what IDL's
> astrolib does, are tools to deal with photometry and spectroscopy. I
> know that some people are fans of sextractor. I don't know to what
> extent it is good and whether or not we should put efforts somewhere
> else but it's definitely worth thinking. PSF photometry, both from an
> analytical (arbitrary) function and from a template array, would be very
> appealing, I think. Same kind of thinking should go toward spectroscopy.

I agree - a well-document general purpose photometric reduction tool
set seems to be lacking for python (except for pyraf, which I think
doesn't really count as true python).

I think SExtractor is clean (and complicated) enough that it's
probably rather duplicated effort to try to actually re-implement it
in python, at least at this stage. If anyone is interested, though, I
have a pyton SExtractor wrapper (part of astropysics.phot) - obviously
SExtractor has to be installed for it, but you can script all of the
SExtractor operations in python using that module.

Spectroscopy tools seem to be a bit more developed in python, though -
pysynphot,  astropysics.spec, PANDORA, perhaps others? - and I think
there are a number of more domain-specific tools out there for
spectra. So for the sake of completeness, I think photometry might be
more the way to go between those.





-- 
Erik Tollerud