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Pysynphot: A Python Re-Implementation of a Legacy App in Astronomy

Victoria G. Laidler
laidler@stsci.edu - Computer Sciences Corporation, Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
Perry Greenfield
perry@stsci.edu - Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
Ivo Busko
busko@stsci.edu - Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
Robert Jedrzejewski
rij@stsci.edu - Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA

Abstract
Pysynphot is a package that allows astronomers to model, combine, and manipulate the spectra of stars or galaxies in simulated observations. It is being developed to replace a widely used legacy application, SYNPHOT. While retaining the data-driven philosophy of the original application, Pysynphot's architecture and improved algorithms were developed to address some of its known weaknesses. The language features available in Python and its libraries, including numpy, often enabled clean solutions to what were messy problems in the original application, and the interactive graphics capabilities of matplotlib/pylab, used with a consistent set of exposed object attributes, eliminated the need to write special-purpose plotting methods. This paper will discuss these points in some detail, as well as providing an overview of the problem domain and the object model.

Citation

V Laidler, P Greenfield, I Busko, R Jedrzejewski, Pysynphot: A Python Re-Implementation of a Legacy App in Astronomy in Proceedings of the 7th Python in Science conference (SciPy 2008), G Varoquaux, T Vaught, J Millman (Eds.), pp. 36-38

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