astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python
Abstract
We present astroplan—an open source, open development, Astropy affiliated package for ground-based observation planning and scheduling in Python. astroplan is designed to provide efficient access to common observational quantities such as celestial rise, set, and meridian transit times and simple transformations from sky coordinates to altitude-azimuth coordinates without requiring a detailed understanding of astropy's implementation of coordinate systems. astroplan provides convenience functions to generate common observational plots such as airmass and parallactic angle as a function of time, along with basic sky (finder) charts. Users can determine whether or not a target is observable given a variety of observing constraints, such as airmass limits, time ranges, Moon illumination/separation ranges, and more. A selection of observation schedulers are included that divide observing time among a list of targets, given observing constraints on those targets. Contributions to the source code from the community are welcome.
Additional Information
© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2017 October 18. Accepted 2017 December 27. Published 2018 February 23. B.M.M., J.B.M. and K.V. gratefully acknowledge support from the Google Summer of Code program in 2015 and 2016. B.M.M. acknowledges financial support from the Python Software Foundation and from the University of Washington eScience Institute, with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We thank Eric Agol and Suzanne Hawley for supporting B.M.M. to devote some PhD thesis time toward developing and maintaining astroplan. B.M.M. graciously acknowledges support from Jake VanderPlas, as well. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France (Wenger et al. 2000).Attached Files
Published - Morris_2018_AJ_155_128.pdf
Submitted - 1712.09631.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 84944
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20180226-071047086
- Python Software Foundation
- University of Washington
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Created
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2018-02-26Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field