Welcome to ObservationTools’s documentation!¶

A set of tools to plan astronomical observations.

Installation¶

With git¶

If you have git installed (or if you want to install git and use it for the first time), then the tools can be installed with the following few commands in the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/iastro-pt/ObservationTools
cd ObservationTools
pip install -r requirements.txt  # You may need to use sudo here

Without git¶

If you do not have git installed, you can just download the entire directory here:

unzip ObservationTools-master.zip
cd ObservationTools-master
pip install -r requirements.txt  # You may need to use sudo here

Updates¶

If you want to update your tools and installed it with git, simply change the directory to this folder and do a git pull. If you don’t used git, you have to do the installation again as described above.

Visibility¶

The script visibility.py is used to plot the observability of objects to aid the planning of astronomical observations. It is inspired by STARALT and PyAstronomy’s Transit Visibility tools.

Modes:¶

Currently there are two user modes of visibility. staralt (default) and starobs. The usage of these is outlined in the following sections.

staralt¶

The staralt mode displays the altitude verse time of targets for a particular night.

For example:

python visibility.py HD41248,HD219828 -s esolasilla -d 2016-04-04

Results in the following image.

It is the default mode if no mode is specified. If the -d, or --date is not provided with the YYYY-MM-DD format is then it defaults to today/.

The observatory location can be specified using the -s or --site flag. The defualt observatory is ESO To find the list of available observatories and name codes run:

from __future__ import print_function, division
from PyAstronomy import pyasl
# List all available observatory data
pyasl.listObservatories()

starobs¶

The starobs mode shows how the altitude, at the mid-dark time, of each target changes over the course of the year. e.g.

python visibility.py HD967,HD22879,HD40865 -m starobs

Draft image

Only the year YYYY is to be specified for the --date flag in this mode.

Other options¶

coordinates¶

The -c flag can be used to just return the coordinates of the targets in STARALT format then exit.

Radial Velocity¶

Coming soon...

People are more than welcome to do pull requests, open issues, give suggestions, etc. on the github repo If you do not have a github user (or don’t want to use github for some obscure reason), I can be contacted at daniel.andreasen@astro.up.pt.