Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE

PyPlate software

PyPlate is an open-source Python package for carrying out tasks in the digitization workflow of astronomical photographic plates. PyPlate has been successfully used for processing data for publication in the APPLAUSE database.

With the pyplate.metadata module, one can read plate metadata in WFPDB and CSV formats, carry out calculations with timestamps and celestial coordinates, save metadata in FITS headers, and output metadata into a MySQL database.

The pyplate.solve module provides functionality for running SExtractor to extract sources from plate images, solving astrometry with Astrometry.net, and carrying out refined astrometric calibration in sub-fields with the SCAMP software.

The PyPlate workflow is described in the following conference paper:

  • Tuvikene T., Edelmann H., Groote D., Enke H., and the APPLAUSE Collaboration. Workflow for plate digitization, data extraction and publication. Astroplate 2014 proceedings (link to PDF), pp. 127-130.

PyPlate is provided under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Download

PyPlate on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyplate
Documentation: http://pythonhosted.org/pyplate/

Install PyPlate with pip:

pip install pyplate

Development

PyPlate repository on GitHub: https://github.com/astrotuvi/pyplate

Clone PyPlate repository with git:

git clone https://github.com/astrotuvi/pyplate.git