astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python

2018 The Astronomical Journal 66 citations

Abstract

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.

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Publication Info

Year
2018
Type
article
Volume
155
Issue
3
Pages
128-128
Citations
66
Access
Closed

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66
OpenAlex
3
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Cite This

Brett M. Morris, Erik Tollerud, Brigitta Sipocz et al. (2018). astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python. The Astronomical Journal , 155 (3) , 128-128. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/aaa47e

Identifiers

DOI
10.3847/1538-3881/aaa47e
arXiv
1712.09631

Data Quality

Data completeness: 84%