thefriendlystars is a Python toolkit for interacting with catalogs of stars and images of the sky. It can be used to make custom finder charts, and it may soon include additional visualizations. Read the (very basic) documentation.
Following The Friendly Stars by Martha Evans Martin (1925), "the chief aim of this [package] is to share with others the pleasure which the writer has had in what may be called a relation of personal friendship with the stars." It is still very much so a work in progress.
(If there's any chance you had been using a pre-2023 version of thefriendlystars, please note it has moved to the-earlier-version-of-the-friendly-stars. We're starting from scratch here!)
You should be able to install this simply by running
pip install thefriendlystarsIf you want to be able to modify the code yourself, please also feel free to fork/clone this repository onto your own computer and install directly from that editable package. For example, this might look like:
git clone git@github.com:zkbt/thefriendlystars.git
cd thefriendlystars/
pip install -e '.[develop]'This will link the installed version of the thefriendlystars package to your local repository. Changes you make to the code in the repository should be reflected in the version Python sees when it tries to import thefriendlystars. The -e means "we can edit the code in its local director"y; the . means "install from this current directory"; and the [develop] means "install the development dependencies for testing and documentation".
Code or conceptual contributions were made by:
The ESA Gaia mission provides the data that sits at the core of thefriendlystars. Any work that makes use of this tiny package should acknowledge the incredible work of the thousands of people who make Gaia possible and cite the Gaia archive.