Useful Tools for Astronomer

Python stuff

There are multiple reasons why Python offers a lot of advantages for astronomers (check this out). Some of the best modules that I found are:

1. The astropy package, which contains key functionality and common tools needed for handling the FITS file, table, coordinate systems, built-in models, convenient fitting algorithms, calculations with units, and much more.
2. The spectral-cube, for reading, manipulating, analyzing, and writing data cubes with two positional dimensions and one spectral dimension.
3. The APLpy (the Astronomical Plotting Library in Python), is a powerful and interactive plotting package aimed at producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data.
4. The scikit-learn, efficient tools for machine learning and predictive data analysis.
5. The Lmfit, a high-level interface to non-linear optimization and curve-fitting problems.
6. The photutils, a module for detecting and performing photometry of astronomical sources.

Reference management

For managing the list of papers that I have read, Mendeley is a good option as a free reference manager. Mendeley also allows you to sort papers by keyword, produce a BibTeX file that can be used for LaTeX documents, and easily annotate PDFs.

Useful websites

1. ArXiv discussions at Benty-fields.
2. Tips and tricks for professional astronomers at AstroBetter.
3. Astronomy-related jobs list at AAS.