How to use Astropy & Astroquery

Originally broadcast on October 7, 2023.

In this How-To webinar, Dr. Matt Craig showed how you can leverage the power of Astropy to perform fundamental astronomy tasks in Python.

Astropy is both a Python package and an ecosystem of related packages meant to provide the nuts and bolts for doing astronomy with Python. It includes tools for representing times and coordinates, and for representing FITS filter and data tables, along with tools to process those things. Astroquery is a part of the Astropy ecosystem which provides a consistent interface to a very wide range of data sources — things like Gaia, TESS, and Kepler data, as well as any data table in the Vizier system (including APASS DR9!). After a little bit about installation, we’ll do some short examples using both Astropy and Astroquery. All of the Python will be in Jupyter notebooks.

Matt Craig is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Minnesota State University Moorhead, a small state university in western Minnesota. He has been a contributor to Astropy since 2013, and is one of the primary authors of the ccdproc package for calibrating data. He spends way too much time working in Jupyter notebooks, but does enjoy turning every problem into a Python problem.

✩ Interested in attending a live How-to webinar on Zoom? Visit https://www.aavso.org/programs-events to view our schedule and register for upcoming events.

**SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS:** Dr. Craig has kindly provided copies of the Jupyter notebooks which he demonstrated during the webinar. You can view these useful code references at the following link:

https://github.com/mwcraig/aavso-astr...