Welcome
Welcome to the Kapteyn Package!
The Kapteyn Package is a collection of Python modules and applications
developed by the computer group of the
Kapteyn Astronomical
Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
The purpose of the package is to provide tools
for the development of astronomical applications with Python.
The package is suitable for both inexperienced and experienced users
and developers and documentation is provided for both groups.
The documentation also provides in-depth chapters about
celestial transformations,
spectral translations
and non-linear least squares
fitting.
The package's most important features:
- The handling of spatial and spectral coordinates,
WCS projections and transformations between different sky systems.
Spectral translations (e.g., between frequencies and velocities) are
supported and also mixed coordinates. (Modules
wcs and
celestial.
Module wcs uses Mark Calabretta's WCSLIB.)
- Versatile tools for writing small and dedicated applications for the
inspection of FITS headers, the extraction and display of (FITS) data,
interactive inspection of this data (color editing) and for the creation
of plots with world coordinate information. See the examples in the
maputils tutorial
and the plots in the
gallery
of all-sky plots.
- A class for the efficient reading, writing and
manipulating simple table-like structures in text files.
(Module tabarray)
- Utilities for use with matplotlib such as
obtaining coordinate information from plots, interactively modifiable
colormaps and timer events
(module mplutil); tools for parsing and
interpreting coordinate information entered by the user (module
positions).
- A function to search for gaussian components in a profile
(module profiles) and
a class for non-linear least squares fitting
(module kmpfit).
Documentation
Documentation
Contents
for a complete overview
General Index
all functions, classes, terms
Search page
search the documentation
PDF documentation
this documentation in PDF format
Examples
Example plots
example plots with source code
All-sky gallery
all-sky plots with source code
Example code
all examples in one file
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Tutorials
Tutorial wcs module
Tutorial maputils module
Least squares fitting with kmpfit
Tutorial tabarray module
Background information
Background module celestial
Background spectral translations
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Get the Kapteyn Package
This unreleased version of the
Kapteyn Package is available for download as a
distutils-installable package.
(tar.gz file. Also available as
zip file)
For installation instructions see the
Introduction chapter or the
file INSTALL.txt in the distribution.
There is also an archive of older versions
of the package.
An experimental installer for Microsoft Windows (together with other
packages that the Kapteyn Package depends on) can be found in
this directory. Only for Python 2.6
on 32-bit systems.