astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python

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.

Affiliated Institutions

• Macquarie University AU
• Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian US
• University of Washington US
• Subaru (Japan) JP
• Space Telescope Science Institute US
• University of Cambridge GB
• Imagination Engines (United States) US
• Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics DE
• California Institute of Technology US
• National Astronomical Observatory of Japan JP
• University of Sheffield GB
• Princeton University US

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