Source Extractor Wrapper for Python

The tiny sewpy module lets you run SExtractor <http://www.astromatic.net/software/sextractor>_ as if it would all be native python...

.. code-block:: python

import sewpy
sew = sewpy.SEW(params=["X_IMAGE", "Y_IMAGE", "FLUX_RADIUS(3)", "FLAGS"],
    config={"DETECT_MINAREA":10, "PHOT_FLUXFRAC":"0.3, 0.5, 0.8"})
out = sew("myimage.fits")
print out["table"] # this is an astropy table.

... but also allows for a more sophisticated use, for instance if you want to use existing SExtractor input files.

Why yet <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pysex/> another <https://gitorious.org/pysextractor> SExtractor wrapper ? Because we needed one that:

• is based on astropy <http://www.astropy.org>_ (in particular astropy.table),
• works with both python 2 and 3,
• uses standard logging (and also logs SExtractor's stdout & stderr to file),
• uses tempfile to hide all input and output files, except if you want to see them
• has some convenience functionality to use SExtractor's ASSOC process (give me an input catalog, and I append columns with SExtractor measurements to it).

The demos in the examples directory can be run without installing sewpy, and provide a quick overview.

Installation (in short)

.. code-block:: bash

python setup.py install --user

Documentation

To learn more about how to install and use sewpy, proceed to its documentation <http://sewpy.readthedocs.org>_.