Useful Tools for Astronomers

Python stuff

Python offers many advantages for astronomy (see this overview). Some useful packages include:

1. Astropy, which provides tools for working with FITS files, tables, coordinate systems, models, fitting, and units.
2. Spectral-cube for reading, manipulating, analyzing, and writing data cubes with two positional dimensions and one spectral dimension.
3. APLpy (the Astronomical Plotting Library in Python) for producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data.
4. scikit-learn for machine learning and predictive data analysis.
5. lmfit for nonlinear optimization and curve-fitting problems.
6. Photutils for detecting and performing photometry of astronomical sources.

Reference management

For managing a list of papers, Mendeley is a free reference manager. It allows you to sort papers by keyword, produce BibTeX files for LaTeX documents, and annotate PDFs.

Useful websites

1. arXiv discussions at Benty-fields.
2. Tips and advice for professional astronomers at AstroBetter.
3. Astronomy-related job listings at the AAS Job Register.