The Astronomer's Toolkit
Modern astronomy runs on software. A path through the ecosystem — the planetariums that show the sky, the suites that automate a night of imaging and process the results, the professional tools that calibrate and analyse data, and the libraries that compute positions and orbits.
Related entities
- Astronomy software
Stellarium
A free, open-source planetarium that renders a photorealistic sky in real time, showing the stars, planets, constellations, and deep-sky objects as they appear from any location and time. Widely used for planning observing sessions and for teaching, Stellarium can also control telescopes and simulate the view through different eyepieces.
- Research software
Astropy
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.
- Research software
TOPCAT
An interactive desktop tool for viewing, cross-matching, plotting, and manipulating large astronomical tables and catalogues, with deep support for Virtual Observatory table formats and services. TOPCAT is a workhorse for exploring catalogue data from surveys and archives.
- Astronomy software
PHD2 Guiding
A free, open-source autoguiding application — the name stands for 'Push Here Dummy' — that images a guide star and issues corrections to the mount to hold a target steady through long exposures. PHD2 is the de-facto standard guider, used on its own or driven by imaging suites like N.I.N.A. and Ekos.