astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python

Abstract

We present astroplan -an open source, open development, Astropy affiliated package for groundbased observation planning and scheduling in Python. astroplan is designed to provide efficient access to common observational quantities such as celestial rise, set, and meridian transit times and simple transformations from sky coordinates to altitude-azimuth coordinates without requiring a detailed understanding of astropy's implementation of coordinate systems. astroplan provides convenience functions to generate common observational plots such as airmass and parallactic angle as a function of time, along with basic sky (finder) charts. Users can determine whether or not a target is observable given a variety of observing constraints, such as airmass limits, time ranges, Moon illumination/separation ranges, and more. A selection of observation schedulers are included which divide observing time among a list of targets, given observing constraints on those targets. Contributions to the source code from the community are welcome.

HIPPI-2: A versatile high-precision polarimeter

“…Originally, with HIPPI, the first step was performed by a code written in FORTRAN 77, and the second step using a Microsoft EXCEL spreadsheet. Now both steps are performed using programs written in PYTHON 2.7.5 using elements from the associated packages NUMPY (Oliphant, 2006), SCIPY (Jones et al, 2001), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter, 2007), ASTROPY (Astropy Collaboration et al, 2013, 2018, ASTROPLAN (Morris et al, 2018) and ASTRO-QUERY (Ginsburg et al, 2019). Although the mathematics of the process is essentially unchanged, rewriting the software has facilitated some improvements of process and enabled better integration between the steps.…”

The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler

“…Greedy optimizers are straightforward to implement, can easily handle changes to observing plans and conditions, provide traceable quantitative optimization, and can be run in an automated fashion. The Astroplan package (Morris et al 2018a) implements one such greedy scheduler. It is designed for human observers and implements a range of observational constraints.…”

Rotational and Rotational-Vibrational Raman Spectroscopy of Air to Characterize Astronomical Spectrographs

“…We are very grateful to the ESO librarians for the outstanding support of our bibliographic excursions beyond the astrophysical realm. This research has made use of the following python packages: matplotlib [52], astropy, a community-developed core python package for Astronomy [53,54], aplpy, an open-source plotting package for python [55], fcmaker [56,57], a python module to create ESOcompliant finding charts for OBs on p2, astroquery, a package hosted at https://astroquery.readthedocs.io which provides a set of tools for querying astronomical web forms and databases [58], astroplan [59], and emcee [60]. This research has also made use of the aladin interactive sky atlas [61], of saoimage ds9…”