PyFITS provides an interface to FITS formatted files in the Python scripting language and PyRAF, the Python-based interface to IRAF. It is useful both for interactive data analysis and for writing analysis scripts in Python using FITS files as either input or output. PyFITS is a development project of the Science Software Branch at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

PyFITS has been deprecated. Please see Astropy.

Astropy provides a common framework, core package of code, and affiliated packages for astronomy in Python. Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in. Astropy is intended to contain much of the core functionality and some common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python.

Halotools builds and tests models of the galaxy-halo connection and analyzes catalogs of dark matter halos. The core functions of the package include fast generation of synthetic galaxy populations using HODs, abundance matching, and related methods; efficient algorithms for calculating galaxy clustering, lensing, z-space distortions, and other astronomical statistics; a modular, object-oriented framework for designing galaxy evolution models; and end-to-end support for reducing halo catalogs and caching them as hdf5 files.

Photutils provides tools for detecting and performing photometry of astronomical sources. It can estimate the background and background rms in astronomical images, detect sources in astronomical images, estimate morphological parameters of those sources (e.g., centroid and shape parameters), and perform aperture and PSF photometry. Written in Python, it is an affiliated package of Astropy (ascl:1304.002).

Astroquery allows users to access online astronomical data from a wide range of sources; it is an Astropy-affiliated package. Each web service has its own sub-package for interfacing with a particular data source.