Python and Astropy for Astronomical Data Analysis

Workshop at the 243rd Meeting of the AAS in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

• DATE: Sunday January 7th, 2024
• TIME: 9AM to 5:30PM Central Standard Time
• LOCATION: Room 212 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center

PRE-WORKSHOP SETUP

Please be sure your laptop is properly configured before the workshop by following the installation and setup instructions.

Warning: Installation and setup could take as long as one hour depending on your current configuration and internet speeds. DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE DAY OF THE WORKSHOP.

If you have any trouble, we will have facilitators on-site as early as 8:30 AM local time who can help you in person.

As an alternative, a workshop session can be run on mybinder.org via this link:

Schedule

Time (PT)	Topic	Presenter/Instructor
9:00 - 9:10am	Install and config help, if needed	Brett Morris (@bmorris3)
9:10 - 9:20am	Intro to Astropy and Code of Conduct	Kelle Cruz (@kelle)
9:20 - 9:45am	Astropy Units, Quantities, and Constants	Brett Morris
9:45 - 10:15am	Intro to Object Oriented Programming (OOP)	Brett Morris
10:15 - 10:30am	BREAK
10:30 - 11:00am	Coordinates	Erik Tollerud (@eteq)
11:00 - 11:30pm	Astropy Tables	Brett Morris
11:30 – 12:00pm	I/O: FITS and ASCII	Brett Morris
12:00 - 1:30pm	LUNCH
1:30 - 2:00pm	Specutils	Erik Tollerud
2:00 - 2:30pm	Photutils	Larry Bradley (@larrybradley)
2:30 - 3:00pm	BREAK
3:00 - 3:20pm	Explore together time
3:20 - 3:40pm	Uncertainty	Erik Tollerud
3:40 - 4:00pm	Astropy Communities & Contributing to Astropy	Kelle Cruz
4:00 - 5:30pm	Explore together time

Additional Helpers

David Shupe (@stargaser), Leo Singer (@lpsinger)

Description

This workshop covers the use of Python tools for astronomical data analysis and visualization, with the focus primarily on UV, Optical, and IR data. Data analysis tools for JWST are being written in Python and distributed as part of Astropy, a community developed Python library for astronomy, and its affiliated packages.

The workshop goals introduce you to the variety of tools which are already available inside the Astropy library as well as provide ample hands-on time during which you’ll be able to explore the science analysis capabilities which the greater Python environment and community provide.

We plan on accomplishing this with brief overview talks on the main tools followed by extended instructor guided tutorials where you’ll be able to try them out for yourself and ask questions in the company of expert users and developers.

Some basic Python experience is highly recommended to be able to effectively participate in the exercises, but those without Python experience will still get much useful information about the capabilities for data analysis in Python and perhaps pick up some pointers on where they can get started learning more scientific Python and integrating it into their work flow.

If you would like to get a head start with the tools we will be concentrating on you can check out their documentation on readthedocs:

• Physical Units and Quantities

• Constants

• Coordinate utilities

• Basics on accessing data files, both FITS and ASCII tables

• Modeling and Fitting

• Astropy WCS

• photutils

• specutils

• ccdproc package documentation and a more extended guide to image reduction with ccdproc

• Contributing to Astropy

• Affiliated Packages

• Other tools we can answer questions about, but probably won't discuss in detail:

  • Numpy
  • Scipy
  • Jupyter
  • Git and Github
  • Git branching

Problems or Questions?

We encourage you to submit any problems or questions you have to this repository issue tracker by choosing the "Question from workshop participant" issue template.

Past Workshops

Materials from past workshops can be found in other branches on this repo and in the past-astropy-workshops repo.