AstroPy

This morning I found this Python package form a post on the iObserve FB wall.

http://www.astrobetter.com/first-public-release-of-astropy/

The current release already contains the following functionality:

• Manipulation of scalar and array quantities with physical units
• Pre-defined physical and astronomical constants
• Celestial coordinate representation and transformations
• Reading/writing/editing of FITS files, VO tables, and many ASCII table formats
• Class for grid-based data with meta-data and units
• Powerful table creation/manipulation
• Common cosmological calculations
• World Coordinate System (WCS) transformations
• Representation/transformation of Times and Dates to very high accuracy

Astropy also includes a lot of infrastructure code that makes it very easy for users to develop their own Astronomy packages, using Astropy as a core dependency.

Then I tried to download and install in on my mac. 

The size of the installing file is just about 5Mb only.

After installing it, I did some tests by following its examples from the document.

It's really helpful, and now I do not have to convert all my shell scripts to Python codes.

It saves my lots of time :P

Happy!

 

You should give it a try!