astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python

TL;DR

astroplan is an open source Python package that simplifies ground-based astronomical observation planning by providing tools for calculating observational quantities, generating plots, and scheduling observations based on constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, community-driven Python package for observation planning that integrates with Astropy and offers new scheduling and visualization functionalities.

Findings

Provides efficient access to observational quantities

Includes scheduling algorithms for target observation

Offers visualization tools like sky charts and airmass plots

Abstract

We present astroplan - an open source, open development, Astropy affiliated package for ground-based observation planning and scheduling in Python. astroplan is designed to provide efficient access to common observational quantities such as celestial rise, set, and meridian transit times and simple transformations from sky coordinates to altitude-azimuth coordinates without requiring a detailed understanding of astropy's implementation of coordinate systems. astroplan provides convenience functions to generate common observational plots such as airmass and parallactic angle as a function of time, along with basic sky (finder) charts. Users can determine whether or not a target is observable given a variety of observing constraints, such as airmass limits, time ranges, Moon illumination/separation ranges, and more. A selection of observation schedulers are included which divide observing time among a list of targets, given observing constraints on those targets. Contributions to the source code from the community are welcome.