[AstroPy] [SciPy-user] FITS images with header-supplied axes?

[James Turner]

Hi everyone,

I agree that it would be good for the community to get into the
habit of exposing work on astronomical Python modules via SciPy
(for example). It seems that the obvious place for this is "AstroLib",
which has been part of the SciPy site for some time, but doesn't seem
to have gathered a lot of momentum yet:

   http://scipy.org/AstroLib

I'm also interested in WCS, as critical functionality that hasn't
quite crystallized yet. Wrapping WCSLib did seem like an obvious
direction when I first looked into this and talked to Perry, but it
seemed that there may be licensing issues to investigate, with it
being GPL (which I personally like, but I'm not sure about internal
policy on relicensing everything).

At Gemini, one thing we have been working on is a data access class
that takes care of some logistics like figuring out the "type"
(meaning instrument, for example, not numerical type) of data,
accessing standard header information in an instrument-agnostic way,
iterating over things like nod sets, FITS extensions and so on. In
future, the class may also support array operations with automatic
propagation of things like variance and header info. This is still
really alpha code at the moment though and I'm not announcing it
officially. Later in the year, we will be working on some generic
spectroscopic data reduction tasks. These things are planned to
operate both in a pipeline context and interactively.

I also have a little script for mosaicing IFU data that might be of
interest to someone, but it still needs converting to NumPy. That
will probably work its way into the official Gemini DR package at
some point.

By the way, those of us at AURA sites will be meeting in June to
discuss collaboration on new DR infrastructure (in general).

Cheers,

James.

-- 
James E.H. Turner
Gemini Observatory Southern Operations Centre,
Casilla 603,		Tel. (+56) 51 205609
La Serena, Chile.	Fax. (+56) 51 205650