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Astrometry.net is a reliable and robust system that takes as input an astronomical image and returns as output the pointing, scale, and orientation of that image (the astrometric calibration or World Coordinate System information). The system requires no first guess, and works with the information in the image pixels alone; that is, the problem is a generalization of the "lost in space" problem in which nothing—not even the image scale—is known. After robust source detection is performed in the input image, asterisms (sets of four or five stars) are geometrically hashed and compared to pre-indexed hashes to generate hypotheses about the astrometric calibration. A hypothesis is only accepted as true if it passes a Bayesian decision theory test against a null hypothesis. With indices built from the USNO-B catalog and designed for uniformity of coverage and redundancy, the success rate is >99.9% for contemporary near-ultraviolet and visual imaging survey data, with no false positives. The failure rate is consistent with the incompleteness of the USNO-B catalog; augmentation with indices built from the Two Micron All Sky Survey catalog brings the completeness to 100% with no false positives. We are using this system to generate consistent and standards-compliant meta-data for digital and digitized imaging from plate repositories, automated observatories, individual scientific investigators, and hobbyists.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) produces large amounts of data daily. transfer, written in Python, provides the effective automation needed for daily data transfer operations and management and operates essentially free of human intervention. This package has been tested and used successfully for several years.
CCDtoRGB produces red‐green‐blue (RGB) composites from three‐band astronomical images, ensuring an object with a specified astronomical color has a unique color in the RGB image rather than burnt‐out white stars. Use of an arcsinh stretch shows faint objects while simultaneously preserving the structure of brighter objects in the field, such as the spiral arms of large galaxies.
kcorrect fits very restricted spectral energy distribution models to galaxy photometry or spectra in the restframe UV, optical and near-infrared. The main purpose of the fits are for calculating K-corrections. The templates used for the fits may also be interpreted physically, since they are based on the Bruzual-Charlot stellar evolution synthesis codes. Thus, for each fit galaxy kcorrect can provide an estimate of the stellar mass-to-light ratio.
Marvin searches, accesses, and visualizes data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey. Written in Python, it provides tools for easy efficient interaction with the MaNGA data via local files, files retrieved from the Science Archive Server, or data directly grabbed from the database. The tools come mainly in the form of convenience functions and classes for interacting with the data. Also available is a web app, Marvin-web, offers an easily accessible interface for searching the MaNGA data and visual exploration of individual MaNGA galaxies or of the entire sample, and a powerful query functionality that uses the API to query the MaNGA databases and return the search results to your python session. Marvin-API is the critical link that allows Marvin-tools and Marvin-web to interact with the databases, which enables users to harness the statistical power of the MaNGA data set.
The MaNGA Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP) processes the raw data to produce flux calibrated, sky subtracted, coadded data cubes from each of the individual exposures for a given galaxy. The DRP consists of two primary parts: the 2d stage that produces flux calibrated fiber spectra from raw individual exposures, and the 3d stage that combines multiple flux calibrated exposures with astrometric information to produce stacked data cubes. These science-grade data cubes are then processed by the MaNGA Data Analysis Pipeline (ascl:2203.017), which measures the shape and location of various spectral features, fits stellar population models, and performs a variety of other analyses necessary to derive astrophysically meaningful quantities from the calibrated data cubes.