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Photutils Plan 2014

Christoph Deil edited this page May 1, 2014 · 6 revisions

This is a link collection to photutils-related documents, discussions, codes, papers, ... we'll use it to plan the photutils work for summer 2014.

Plan

We will have a Google Hangout soon: http://doodle.com/9csaybixk5g6vb58i48cv3hk

These are some of the points we should discuss / decide:

  • What's the timeline, requirements for photutils to become astropy.photometry? Should there be photutils releases (see milestones) so that we can get more people to try it out?
  • Who takes lead on updating the photutils API document? Do we need to look at generalised WCS and ccdproc or are those independent?
  • What's the timeline for including findobj? (see here)
  • Should we use scikit-image as a dependency for photutils? E.g. findobj.moments is basically a copy of scikit-image code (see here) and many image analysis and measurement methods are available in scikit-image, e.g. blob detection. It would be great to have wrappers for those in photutils that work with world coordinates.

Documents

  • Astropy Photometry API proposal: photometry.py and associated discussion. There's more discussion here and here.

    This is mostly from 2012 and since then Astropy has come a long way (e.g. quantities, coordinates) and several new parts are in progress (e.g. generalised WCS, ccdproc) We probably should re-discuss the astropy.photometry API and have an updated API proposal before Brigitta starts her GSoC.

  • Brigitta Sipőcz - Accepted GSoC 2014 proposal, blog "Astropy: Enhancing the photutils package functionality"

  • Axel Donath - GSoC 2013 blog, proposal

  • Generalized WCS API proposal, code by Nadia Dencheva (@nden).

Relevant codes

The following codes are relevant for photutils (the future astropy.photometry).

  • findobj: code, docs : Larry Bradley (@larrybradley)

    A package to identify stars and estimate source morphological parameters in an astronomical image.

    Planned to be integrated into photutils ... discussion here.

  • astropy.ccdproc code, docs, API proposal (not merged) ccdproc_api.py and discussion.

  • Scikit-image webpage, code, docs

    Image processing in Python.

Less relevant codes

The following codes contain related functionality, but are not directly relevant for photutils API or implementation.

  • montage-wrapper : Tom Robitaille (@astrofrog) webpage docs code

    Python wrapper for the Montage mosaicking toolkit

  • python-reprojection : Tom Robitaille (@astrofrog) code

    Python-based Astronomical image reprojection

  • https://github.com/radio-astro-tools/spectral-cube

    "This package aims to facilitate the reading, writing, manipulation, and analysis of spectral data cubes." Is photometry for spectral data cubes in scope or out of scope for photutils?

  • https://github.com/durga2112/imagecube

    An independent Astropy affiliated package? maintained?

  • C library for Source Extraction and Photometry code and docs : Kyle Barbary (@kbarbary)

    A re-implementation of SExtractor background estimation and detection. GPL3 license, so can't be used by Astropy / photutils.

  • Adam Ginsburg is implementing some FITS_tools and image_registration methods.

  • There's some image handling functions in gammapy.image that should either go into Astropy or Photutils ... e.g. block_reduce_hdu.

  • Eric Sheldon (@esheldon) has written C code with Python wrapper to interpolate and reconstruct PSFEx images here (no license mentioned).

  • Dustin Lang (@dstndstn) and David Hogg are working on a GPL-licensed tractor.