Installing Astropysics

Requirements

Before you do anything with astropysics, you’ll need:

• Python 2.5 or higher (2.6 highly recommended), although 3.x is not yet supported.
• numpy
• scipy

Follow the instructions on those sites, or, far easier, install them as packages from your operating system (e.g. apt-get or the synaptic GUI on Ubuntu, Macports on OS X, etc.).

Install

Once you have the requirements satisfied, you have a few options for installing astropysics.

Note

On most unix-like systems, you will need to either execute these commands as the root user, or preface them with sudo.

If you have pip (the new, better easy installer) or easy_install/setuptools (you should probably install pip...), just run either:

pip install astropysics

or:

easy_install astropysics

If you are installing from source code, instead, just do:

python setup.py install

If you plan on using the most up-to-date version of astropysics or if you wish to alter the source code (see Developer Guidelines for Astropysics), a useful way to immediately see changes without having to re-install every time is to use the command:

python setup.py develop

Setup

After the package has been installed, at the command line, run:

astpys-setup

This script does two things:

• Prompts you to select which optional packages you want to download and install.
• Configures IPython to support the ipyastpys script (described in Getting Started/Tutorial).

The first of these involves an interactive process that downloads and installed requested packages. To install all of them, type a (and hit enter), otherwise choose a number to install that package. If you want to quit before installing all of the package (for example, if some don’t install correctly), choose q. For information on a package, type i# (where # is the number for the package).

Note that if you can’t get any packages to install, you might try running the script as:

astpys-setup -s

Depending on your operating system, you may want to use your package management system to install the recommended packages, before running the setup (although you may need the more up-to-date versions given here).

Recommended Packages

A number of other packages are necessary for added functionality in astropysics or to provide functionality that has no need to be duplicated. These packages can be installed with the astpys-setup script as described in Setup, but if available from your system’s package management system, it may be better to try installing that way, instead.

• Matplotlib

  highly recommended, as it is necessary for all plotting (aside from the GUI applications).

• IPython

  highly recommended, as it is a far better interactive shell than the python default and has many wonderful features. Necessary for the ipyastpys script.

• NetworkX

  highly recommended, as it is used for a variety of internal purposes as well as any place where a network/graph is plotted.

• PyGraphviz

  It might also be useful to have a closely related package for generating graphviz graphs from networkx.

• pyfits

  highly recommended, necessary for reading FITS files (the most common astronomy data format).

• asciitable <http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/contrib/asciitable/>

  A valuable tool for loading and writing ASCII tables.

• ATpy <http://atpy.github.com/>

  Astronomical Tables in Python - a general tool for dealing with tabular data, both ASCII (uses asciitable) and other formats.

• pidly <http://astronomy.sussex.ac.uk/~anthonys/pidly/>

  IDL within Python. For those times when someone sends you an IDL code that you don’t have the time to convert to python, but want to be able to call from inside python. Requires IDL to be installed.

• Traits, TraitsGUI, Chaco, and Mayavi. Alternatively, ETS is all bundled in one.

  Necessary for the interfaces in the gui modules:

  pip install ETS
  

  or:

  pip install traits
  pip install traitsGUI
  pip install chaco
  pip install mayavi
  

Astropysics also includes pythonic wrappers around some astronomy-related tools that need to be installed seperately if their functionality is desired:

• SExtractor
• Kcorrect