AstroPack (a.k.a. MAATv2)

Astronomy, Astrophysics, & Image Processing Software Pacakge

Main Developers: Eran Ofek, Sasha Krassilchtchikov, Chen Tishler, Yossi Shvartzvald, Amir Sharon, Dan Elhanati, Ruslan Konno, Noam Segev (Weizmann Institute of Science)

Installation:

1. git clone
2. git checkout dev1
3. From matlab: edit manuals.Install, and follow the instructions.

For detailed installtion instruction, see the Install wiki page.

Credit:

Please cite:

1. Ofek (2014);
2. Soumagnac and Ofek (2018); );
3. Ofek (2019);
4. Ofek et al., in prep.

Getting started and documentation

See getting started wiki page, or from matlab: edit manuals.GettingStarted, and the inspect the content of the manuals package.

Documentation is available in the github wiki page, or in matlab, after installtion, in the manuals package.

Content

A collection of several thousands functions for astronomy, astrophysics, and image processing applications.

The following topics are covered:

Astronomical Image Processing

Celestial coordinates

Celestial mechanics

Virtual Observatory excess

Large catalogs and catsHTM

Statistics

Telescopes and Optics

Spectra and filters

Time series analysis

Cosmology

Gravitational lensing

General utilities

See also List of all functions, and getting started. For detailed help see the AstroPack/MAATv2 wiki page The following topics are covered:

Astronomical Image Processing

AstroPack/MAATv2 contains tools for image analysis of astronomical images. The tools includes most of the required functions for image analysis from the basic calibration of images, source finding, photometry, astrometry, catalog matching, photometric calibration, light curves, image coaddition, reference image management, image subtraction, and database storage. The main tools includes a data container class for astronomical images (AstroImage). It supports arrays of classes, such that each element of the object contains one image with all its metadata (e.g., header, catalog, PSF, WCS, background image, variance image, and mask image. The classes provides easy to use arithmatic and logical manipulation of images. In addition low-level and high-level tools are available in several associated packages (e.g., imProc).

Celestial coordinates

A large number of tools for coordinates calculations, conversion, and manipulation is available (e.g., in the celestial package).

Celestial mechanics

The celestial package also contains large number of tools for solving the Kepler equation, generating low precision and high precision epehmeris, querying the JPL horizons website, plotting star maps, and more.

Large catalogs and catsHTM

AstroPack/MAATv2 supports astronomical catalog access via three channels:

1. The catsHTM class allows for coordinate-based fast access of big astronomical catalags. Currently, over 20 catalogs are available in the catsHTM format. catsHTM is described in Soumagnac & Ofek 2018.
2. The cats package that can be use to store and access small catalogs (i.e., up to tens of milions of entries).
3. Web access of catalogs - e.g., VizieR, SDSS, PS1, GALAEX.

Virtual Observatory access

The VO package include tools for accessing several astronomical databases and for formatting catalogs.

Telescopes and Optics

The telescope package includes tools for signal-to-noise calculations and speckle images simulations.

Spectra and filters

Tools to analyze astronomical spectra, database of astronomical spectra, and a database of astronomical telescope filters.

Time series analysis

Tools for time series analysis including periodicity searches, and time delay estimation (e.g., Springer & Ofek 2021a, Springer & Ofek 2021b).

Cosmology

Tools for calculating comsological distances and related properties.

Gravitational lensing

Basic tools for gravitational lensing.

Statistics

Tools for statistical analysis.

General utilities

Tools for I/O, WWW access, array and other classes manipulation, and more.

Changelog

Here