[AstroPy] Proliferating py-astro-libs

[Steve Crawford]

Hi everyone,

I would be very keen to participate in the discussion and I've added my information to the contact page.   I haven't been very involved with the community so far, but I would like to get more involved and stop working away at the fringes.  I'd be very keen on participating in this discussion and if I'm able to, I'd hope to attend (either in person or via videocon) and the northern Fall would be perfect. 

Just to give anyone interested a little background information about myself and what I'm working on, I'm the lead developer for PySALT ( http://pysalt.salt.ac.za/) which is a python/pyraf package for data reduction of SALT data.  The next version will be released shortly, although it has gotten held up by actually getting the telescope on sky and working.   The next version will include packages for basic data reduction, long slit spectroscopy, Fabry-Perot, and high-speed photometry.  Although PySALT uses some IRAF tasks, I've been slowly replacing the functionality for some of the basic reduction routines as much as I can with pure python.  Unfortunately, our resources are very limited so I'm very supportive of this idea of not replicating the work!

One other thing I've developed as part of this is the PySpectrograph package (http://code.google.com/p/pyspectrograph/), which can provide a general model for a spectrograph with a single dispersive element and provide functionality for general analysis of spectroscopic data.

Even though we are small, the South African community is very active in python development with major functions of both SALT and MeerKAT having python as the back end and with python being taught to the students coming through our main programs.   

Cheers,
Steve Crawford