Easy asteroid phase curve fitting for the Python ecosystem: Pyedra

TL;DR

Pyedra is a Python package that simplifies fitting asteroid phase curves, offering multiple models, visualization, and data integration to aid astronomical analysis of asteroid brightness variations.

Contribution

The paper introduces Pyedra, a comprehensive Python toolkit for modeling and visualizing asteroid phase curves, with a focus on usability and extensibility.

Findings

Provides three phase-curve models in Pyedra

Includes visualization and data integration features

Ensures quality through documentation and testing

Abstract

A trending astronomical phenomenon to study is the variation in brightness of asteroids, caused by its rotation on its own axis, non-spherical shapes, changes of albedo along its surface and its position relative to the sun. The latter behaviour can be visualized on a "Phase Curve" (phase angle vs. reduced magnitude). To enable the comparison between several models proposed for this curve we present a Python package called Pyedra. Pyedra implements three phase-curve-models, and also providing capabilities for visualization as well as integration with external datasets. The package is fully documented and tested following a strict quality-assurance workflow, with a user-friendly programmatic interface. In future versions, we will include more models, and additional estimation of quantities derived from parameters like diameter, and types of albedo; as well as enabling correlation of information of physical and orbital parameters.