How to Work With Astronomical Data: A Tutorial

Markus Pössel posted the review paper A Beginner’s Guide to Working with Astronomical Data. It’s a comprehensive overview of processing astronomical images, spectra, and catalog data with application software and the Python programming language. The paper also covers simulations and simulated data.

The value of this paper is it distills into a single resource a lot of material available elsewhere, and provides guidance on getting started with the major categories of astronomical data.

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated and they are published only if approved by the blog owner. Comments that are spammy, trolling, hateful, malicious, or otherwise inappropriate will be removed without notice at the sole discretion of the blog owner.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Use Kivy on Repl.it

Image
I made the Kivy Python cross-platform GUI framework work in a GFX REPL on Repl.it. Repl.it is a multi-language cloud IDE with good support for Python.

To use Kivy on Repl.it, just create a Pygame REPL, which is among the Kivy dependencies, and install Kivy with the package manager or by adding kivy to requirements.txt. Starting such a REPL in a new session takes a while to download and build the required libraries, at least several minutes. So be patient.

This REPL runs the Kivy Showcase, a demo app that showcases some of Kivy’s features.



The demo works fine except for a few overlapping widgets in the top bar. And it has some latency issues, but the poor performance is mostly a consequence of the experimental state of GFX.

If you adjust the handles along the edges of the REPL panes to close all the panes except the app’s, you can use most of the web page area. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like. I can’t wait for GFX to support running graphical apps as a website, like it’s now p…
Read more

Hello, Planet Python!

Image
Planet Python is now syndicating the posts about Python of my blog. Thanks to the project maintainer Bruno Rocha for letting me join.

You may think of Planet Python as the all-you-can-eat source of Python content.


It’s an aggregator of dozens of blogs, podcasts, and other resources on the Python programming language. It syndicates posts that cover Python or are of interest to the Python community. Planet Python is a terrific resource for learning the language and keeping up with what’s going on in its ecosystem. I highly recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed of Planet Python.

If you’re reading this on Planet Python, hi there!

About me I’m Paolo Amoroso, an Italian astronomy and space popularizer, a Google expert, and a podcaster. I’m a Python beginner as I started learning the language in December 2018. But I have been a hobby programmer since the home computer revolution of the early 1980s. And I have always had a soft spot for programming languages, paradigms, and compilers.

…
Read more

My Favorite Image Annotation Android App

Image
I loved Skitch, the handy little image annotation Android app Evernote discontinued in 2015. It took a while but I eventually found a full replacement that’s even better than Skitch.

Annotate - Image Annotation Tool is a vector image annotation and editing app for Android. It provides drawing tools and shapes that cover the most common annotation needs, as well as a few advanced ones such as highlighting text or image areas and creating magnified insets of specific details. These features are packaged in a clean and efficient user interface that doesn’t get in the way of quick annotations.

Here’s what an annotated screenshot looks like in the app on my Pixel 2 XL phone.


Annotate’s key feature is it’s a vector drawing app, not a bitmap one, which lets you easily edit already created graphical elements such as changing their sizes and positions. This is essential as in most cases working on an image requires some iterations and tweaks before saving the final version.

As a bonus Annotate …
Read more