ASTR 302, Winter 2024, University of Washington:

Python for Astronomy

Mario Jurić

Location

• When: 2:30-3:50, Monday & Wednesday, Winter quarter 2024
• Where: PAA 216

Class Materials

• Syllabus and course description
• Lectures

Useful Textbooks

We will largely rely on material freely available on the web; however, these two books may be useful for a more in-depth dive:

• Lutz: Learning Python
• VanderPlas: Python Data Science Handbook

(note: both are freely available as e-books through UW University Libraries).

Class Description

ASTR 302, “Python for Astronomy”, is a course designed to teach how to effectively use Python for research and astronomical data analysis. We will begin with a gentle introduction to key tools and libraries used in astronomy, use these to analyze data (from kilobytes to tens of gigabytes!), visualize (sometimes large) datasets, automate analyses, and apply what we’ve learned to reproduce results of some key astronomy papers.

This course assumes you know basic Python and related astronomy libraries at the ASTR 300 level. It will give you the broad foundation needed to proceed to “ASTR 324: Introduction to Astrostatistics and Machine Learning in Astronomy”, or ASTR 497 “Big Data in Astronomy: Hands-on with Large Surveys”, or independent research projects.