This workshop will cover the use of Python tools to analyze astronomical data, with the focus primarily on Optical, IR and UV data analysis tools. The primary tools that will be covered are those available in the Astropy library and affiliated packages. The specific tools to be covered will be:

• Physical units and quantities
• Basics on accessing data files, both FITS and ascii tables
• Coordinate utilities
• Modeling and Fitting
• Photometric tools
• Interactive visualization and analysis tools:
  • Glue
  • imexam
  • specview

There will be time spent on hands-on exercises. Instructions on installing the necessary software will be provided before the workshop and help will be available at the workshop for those that experience problems with installations.

The prerequisites are a familiarity with astronomical data analysis. Basic Python experience is highly recommended to be able to participate in the exercises. Those without Python experience will still get much useful information about the capabilities for data analysis in Python. Experience with Python scientific libraries, particularly numpy and matplotlib, is helpful, but not required.

To follow along with the tutorials and to do the exercises, you will need to have the following packages installed:

• Python 2.6 (>= 2.6.5), 2.7, or >= 3.3
• IPython (>= 4.0) and Jupyter Notebook (>= 1.0)
• Numpy >= 1.6
• Scipy >= 0.15
• Pandas >= 0.17
• xlwt >= 1.0
• matplotlib >= 1.3
• Astropy 1.1
• Photutils 0.2
• scikit-image >= 0.11
• pandas
• Glue
• imexam

You can run the check_env.py script to check your Python environment for the required dependencies:

% python check_env.py