PYTHON for Variable Star Astronomy (Abstract)

Volume 46 number 1 (2018)

Matt Craig

Minnesota State University, Moorhead, Department of Physics and Astronomy, 1104 7th Avenue South, Moorhead, MN 56563; mcraig@mnstate.edu

Abstract

(Abstract only) Open source PYTHON packages that are useful for data reduction, photometry, and other tasks relevant to variable star astronomy have been developed over the last three to four years as part of the Astropy project. Using this software, it is relatively straightforward to reduce images, automatically detect sources, and match them to catalogs. Over the last year browser-based tools for performing some of those tasks have been developed that minimize or eliminate the need to write any of your own code. After providing an overview of the current state of the software, an application that calculates transformation coefficients on a frame-by-frame basis by matching stars in an image to the APASS catalog will be described.