astLib provides some tools for research astronomers who use Python.

• Documentation: https://astlib.readthedocs.io
• License: LGPL
• Authors: Matt Hilton & Steven Boada
• Installation: pip install astLib
• Support: Please use the GitHub issues page, and/or contact Matt Hilton.

astLib is divided into several modules:

• astCalc (general calculations, e.g. luminosity distance etc.)
• astCoords (coordinate conversions etc.)
• astImages (clip sections from .fits etc.)
• astPlots (provides a flexible image plot class, e.g. plot image with catalogue objects overlaid)
• astSED (calculate colours, magnitudes from stellar population models or spectral templates, fit photometric observations using stellar population models etc.)
• astStats (statistics, e.g. biweight location/scale estimators etc.)
• astWCS (routines for using FITS World Coordinate System information)

The astWCS module is a higher level interface to PyWCSTools, a simple SWIG (http://www.swig.org) wrapping of some of the routines from WCSTools by Jessica Mink (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/). It is used by some routines in astCoords, astImages and astPlots.

The goal of astLib was to provide features useful to astronomers that are not included in the scipy (http://scipy.org), numpy (http://numpy.scipy.org) or matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net) modules on which astLib depends. For a far more extensive set of Python astronomy modules, see astropy (http://www.astropy.org/).

Some scripts using astLib can be found in the examples/ folder provided with the source code distribution.