Astroinformatics & the Virtual Research Ecosystem

The community-developed core package for astronomy in Python, providing the shared building blocks the field relies on: physical units and constants, celestial coordinate transformations, time scales, cosmological calculations, and reading and writing of FITS and other data formats. A large ecosystem of affiliated packages builds on its foundation.

An Astropy-affiliated package that lets researchers query the major astronomical archives and databases directly from code. Instead of clicking through web forms, a scientist can pull catalogues and images from MAST, VizieR, SIMBAD, and dozens of other services programmatically, making analyses scriptable and repeatable.

Interactive documents that weave together live code, results, plots, and narrative text in one place. Notebooks have become the default medium for exploratory analysis, teaching, and sharing reproducible research in astronomy, and they sit at the heart of the cloud-based science platforms now serving the largest surveys.

The tools and craft of turning data into images that reveal structure — from the ubiquitous Matplotlib plots to interactive and three-dimensional renderings of simulations and surveys. Visualisation is both how astronomers explore their data and how they communicate discoveries.

The community package for solar physics in Python, the solar counterpart to Astropy. It provides the data structures, coordinate frames, and access to solar observatory archives that let researchers analyse images and time series of the Sun within the same open scientific-Python ecosystem.

The open-source foundation of modern astronomical computing: the Python language together with NumPy for array mathematics, SciPy for scientific algorithms, and pandas for tabular data. Free and community-built, it has become the common language in which most astronomical analysis is now written.