Abstract

Pysynphot: A Replacement for STSDAS.SYNPHOT

Victoria G. Laidler (CSC/STScI)

Ivo Busko, Perry Greenfield, Robert Jedrzejewski (STScI)

Pysynphot is a modern-language successor to the IRAF/STSDAS synthetic photometry package SYNPHOT. Written in Python, it is suitable for either library or interactive use. Its object-oriented architecture provides a versatile user interface, allowing the user to construct, combine, manipulate, and plot spectra and bandpasses. It features improved precision arithmetic, improved handling of wavelength sampling, and has no IRAF dependencies. It retains the data-driven philosophy of its predecessor, and will run under PyRAF or vanilla Python. In this session, we will demonstrate the interactive use of Pysynphot to work with bandpasses, spectra, and simulated observations in the usual set of units supported by SYNPHOT, providing functionality similar to the SYNPHOT tasks calcspec, calcband, plspec, plband, showfiles, and countrate. The planned development and release schedule for the project will also be reviewed.

Mode of presentation: focus