From mattyowl at googlemail.com Wed Aug 15 10:58:13 2007 From: mattyowl at googlemail.com (Matt Hilton) Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:58:13 +0100 Subject: [AstroPy] astLib Message-ID: Hi, In case anyone here is interested, I have released a set of Python astronomy modules called astLib: http://astlib.sourceforge.net astLib is made up of some of the Python code I wrote during my PhD, hopefully reasonably well packaged and documented. It includes modules for doing calculations (pretty much cosmological distances at present), coordinate conversions, a few statistics routines (not terribly useful given the abundance of stats functions in scipy and R), methods for clipping sections from FITS images and saving as .pngs etc., and accessing World Coordinate System (WCS) information in FITS images (performing conversions between pixel and WCS coordinates etc.). I thought that the ability to use WCS information from within Python may be of use to someone, as I'm not aware of any existing available Python module that provides this. This is done using a simple SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) wrapping of some WCSTools (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/) subroutines, with a higher level interface (astWCS) layered over the top. I don't have any particularly concrete plans for further development of astLib: help is welcome from anyone wanting to contribute code, otherwise I'm likely to add features as I require them in my work. Cheers, Matt. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cygnusxlist at mac.com Mon Aug 20 22:21:00 2007 From: cygnusxlist at mac.com (cygnusxlist at mac.com) Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:21:00 -0400 Subject: [AstroPy] Python-generated skymaps Message-ID: I'd been looking to improve the background star fields in the SVS visualizations and finally had some time to expand on some skymap generation code I'd developed for another project. These maps were generated using python, PIL, numpy, and some scipy. To see and download our new maps, available in several high- resolution sizes and magnitude limits, check here: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003442/ These are mapped for Cylindrical-Equidistant (Platte-Carre) projection with stars distorted so they return to 'disks' when projected on a sphere as is done by many animation tools we use. Feel free to contact me if you notice any problems (such as significant objects missing??) beyond those noted in the description. If you know of additional datasets to improve the product, I'd be interested in that as well. Tom -- W.T. Bridgman, Ph.D. Physics & Astronomy