Series
SMACK 9: The Python Ecosystem for Astronomy

Abstract

In the last decade, Python went from being a moderated-used programming language in the astronomical community to the de-facto standard in Astronomy. Its recent growth has been spectacular, thanks to the coordination and work of the community to create astropy, the core astronomy library, as well as other base libraries like numpy and matplotlib. However, the current scientific/astronomical ecosystem for Python is huge and sparse, introducing many types of objects and methods, often confusing at the beginning.

In this SMACK talk I will describe the current status of the Python ecosystem for astronomy and introduce the most import elements of the core libraries, numpy and astropy, showing with practical examples how they provide new impressive capabilities to deal with data, catalogs, coordinates and much more, making life easier for astrophysicists.