Specutils is an Astropy affiliated package with the goal of providing a shared set of Python representations of astronomical spectra and basic tools to operate on these spectra. The effort is also meant to be a "hub", helping to unite the Python astronomical spectroscopy community around shared effort, much as Astropy is meant to for the wider astronomy Python ecosystem. This broader effort is outlined in the APE13 document.

Note that Specutils is not intended to meet all possible spectroscopic analysis or reduction needs. While it provides some standard analysis functionality (following the Python philosophy of "batteries included"), it is best thought of as a "tool box" that provides pieces of functionality that can be used to build a particular scientific workflow or higher-level analysis tool. To that end, it is also meant to facilitate connecting together disparate reduction pipelines and analysis tools through shared Python representations of spectroscopic data.

For details on installing and using Specutils, see the specutils documentation.

Note that Specutils now only supports Python 3. While some functionality may continue to work on Python 2, it is not tested and support cannot be guaranteed (due to the sunsetting of Python 2 support by the Python and Astropy development teams).

This project is Copyright (c) Specutils Developers and licensed under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause license. This package is based upon the Astropy package template which is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license. See the licenses folder for more information.

We love contributions! specutils is open source, built on open source, and we'd love to have you hang out in our community.

Imposter syndrome disclaimer: We want your help. No, really.

There may be a little voice inside your head that is telling you that you're not ready to be an open source contributor; that your skills aren't nearly good enough to contribute. What could you possibly offer a project like this one?

We assure you - the little voice in your head is wrong. If you can write code at all, you can contribute code to open source. Contributing to open source projects is a fantastic way to advance one's coding skills. Writing perfect code isn't the measure of a good developer (that would disqualify all of us!); it's trying to create something, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. That's how we all improve, and we are happy to help others learn.

Being an open source contributor doesn't just mean writing code, either. You can help out by writing documentation, tests, or even giving feedback about the project (and yes - that includes giving feedback about the contribution process). Some of these contributions may be the most valuable to the project as a whole, because you're coming to the project with fresh eyes, so you can see the errors and assumptions that seasoned contributors have glossed over.

Note: This disclaimer was originally written by Adrienne Lowe for a PyCon talk, and was adapted by specutils based on its use in the README file for the MetPy project.