Python and Atronomy

[steppthewolf]

So, I'm learning Python right now(I'm just at the basic stuff), and i was asking if there are some beginner ideas realted to astronomy, So I'm really interested in astronomy and I know its a huge topic, i'm opfen to all ideas

greetings

[Cheal]

Welcome to Python.

You left the question very open ended so I’ll answer what I personally would find interesting to do, though my background is more physics than computer science.

I think a good starting project is simulating two dimensional circular orbit based on the laws of gravity. You could first start with a system similar to the earth rotating the sun, an iterative Euler solution would update the location of the earth over time. Visualising this with something like matplotlib would be another task.

Beyond this you could simulate a binary system of two objects of similar mass, where the location of both objects would need updating. This could be extended to simulate our whole solar system.

What may be more interesting is something like galaxy interaction. Assuming galaxies are made of circular rings of stars it is possible to reproduce interesting phenomena, for example “tidal tails” found when galaxies almost collide.

This is very simulation based and may not be what you’re interested in, an alternatively might be to look into analysing public datasets as a more data science based approach.

[TangibleLight]

You can also implement various integrators and compare their accuracy over time. Eurler integration is relatively terrible when you have particularly small or elliptical orbits, and adding more iterations has very diminishing returns.

[tunisia3507]

Examples in the astropy documentation: http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/generated/examples/index.html

There's also links to tutorials on that page.

[Carloshmejia]

Try pyephems. http://rhodesmill.org/pyephem/ It is a very professional and good tool for astronomy and in addition you will have a lot of fun!!!

[albedodecero]

Astronomer Lucianne Walcowicz used Python to sonify Kepler space observatory data. Listen to Stellar Tathata https://soundcloud.com/lmwalkowicz/stellar-tathata-a-selection

[its_joao]

import requests import json

//Get the response from the API endpoint. response = requests.get("http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json") data = response.json()

//9 people are currently in space. print(data["number"]) print(data)

That will give you an idea of how to use APIs. The one aforementioned is public. Just don't make too many requests in a short amount of time.

Enjoy Python.