The package teareduce

The package teareduce#

The Python package teareduce has been initially developed by Nicolás Cardiel to facilitate the reduction of astronomical images within the course Experimental Techniques in Astrophysics, which is part of the Master’s Degree in Astrophysics at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (UCM).

Different people at UCM have contributed to the development and testing of this package: Sergio Pascual, María Chillarón, Cristina Cabello, Jesús Gallego and Jaime Zamorano. Acknowledgment is also given to Maite Ceballos (IFCA) for her help in setting up this documentation website.

Thanks are also extended to many students of the Master’s in Astrophysics at UCM who, in recent years, have used this code in their practical work associated with the reduction of astronomical observations obtained with different instruments and telescopes.

Purpose#

This package is not intended to be a general-purpose image reduction code. It only includes specific operations required in certain steps of the traditional astronomical image reduction process that, at the time of its creation, were not available in more established packages such as ccdproc. Students can examine the Python code and introduce modifications in order to gain a deeper understanding of the operations performed during the astronomical image reduction process. In addition, it also offers alternative ways to perform certain tasks that we have found to be more practical for use in Master’s level classes.

Installation#

The teareduce package is available on PyPI and can be installed using pip.

The repository of the code is available in GitHub.

Creating a Python virtual environment#

It is strongly recommended to install teareduce in a clean Python environment to avoid dependency conflicts. You can create and activate a new virtual environment using one of the following methods:

Using venv (Python standard library):

$ python -m venv venv_tea
$ source venv_tea/bin/activate  # On Linux/macOS
# or
$ venv_tea\Scripts\activate  # On Windows

Using conda:

$ conda create -n venv_tea python=3
$ conda activate venv_tea

Installing teareduce#

Once your environment is activated, install teareduce with:

(venv_tea) $ pip install teareduce

To verify the installation:

(venv_tea) $ python3 -c "import teareduce; print(teareduce.__version__)"
0.6.8

Warning

If you are planning to use tea-cleanest, you need to install this package with extra dependencies. In this case employ:

(venv_tea) $ pip install 'teareduce[cleanest]'

In addition, to use the PyCosmic method, you must manually install its corresponding package; otherwise, tea-cleanest will run, but this method will not be available. Since the package is not published on PyPI, it can be installed directly from GitHub. To do so, use a recent fork of the repository by running:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/nicocardiel/PyCosmic.git@test

Note

On PyPI there is a package called tea that provides utilities unrelated to teareduce. However, throughout this documentation we will often use

import teareduce as tea

as a convenient alias when working with our package.

Table of contents#

The different sections of this document consist of Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate the practical use of the defined functionality. Each notebook can be easily downloaded using the download icon that appears at the top of each web page.

This document has been generated with the help of the Jupyter Book package.

Contents