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arXiv · 2610.11429

radio-astro-tools: linking radio astronomical data to the astronomical Python ecosystem

Eric W. Koch·Adam Ginsburg·Thomas P. Robitaille·Erik W. Rosolowsky·Alyssa Bulatek·Savannah Gramze·Jonathan D. Henshaw·Derek Homeier·Preshanth Jagannathan·Amanda A. Kepley·Adam K. Leroy·Sébastien Maret·Stuart Mumford·George Privon·Álvaro Sánchez-Monge·Srikrishna Sekhar·Brigitta Sipőcz·A. J. M. Thomson
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Abstract

We present the radio-astro-tools code suite, which consists of several Python packages that enable analysis of radio data, especially interferometric spectral cubes, in the context of the Astropy software ecosystem. While these tools were designed with radio data in mind, they are built to be general and have applications on data sets at other wavelengths. The core package, spectral-cube, handles reading, writing and analysis of cube data, and it enables straightforward parallelization via dask and joblib backends. Support packages include casa-formats-io and radio-beam, which handle reading of CASA tables & images and reading and manipulation of point spread functions, respectively. The pvextractor package facilitates creation of position-velocity diagrams. The uvcombine package implements the "feather" algorithm for combining single-dish and interferometric data. The development of radio-astro-tools included several contributions to other repositories, including matplotlib, astropy, and regions to support interaction between CASA and other parts of the astronomy software ecosystem. We also present a detailed set of tutorials written in Jupyter notebooks that can be run interactively in a browser, providing more accessible access to data analysis for radio spectral-line data cubes.

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Eric W. Koch, Adam Ginsburg, Thomas P. Robitaille, Erik W. Rosolowsky, Alyssa Bulatek, Savannah Gramze, Jonathan D. Henshaw, Derek Homeier, Preshanth Jagannathan, Amanda A. Kepley, Adam K. Leroy, Sébastien Maret, Stuart Mumford, George Privon, Álvaro Sánchez-Monge, Srikrishna Sekhar, Brigitta Sipőcz, A. J. M. Thomson. 2026-10-08. radio-astro-tools: linking radio astronomical data to the astronomical Python ecosystem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11429

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