pyspeckit: A spectroscopic analysis and plotting package

TL;DR

pyspeckit is an open-source Python toolkit for spectroscopic data analysis, offering interactive fitting, optimization options, and parallel processing, integrated within the astropy ecosystem.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, open-source Python package with advanced fitting capabilities, including parallel processing and multiple optimization methods, for spectroscopic analysis.

Findings

Supports interactive model fitting similar to IRAF splot

Includes multiple optimization algorithms like Levenberg-Marquardt, pymc, and emcee

Provides parallelized spectral cube line fitting

Abstract

pyspeckit is a toolkit and library for spectroscopic analysis in Python. We describe the pyspeckit package and highlight some of its capabilities, such as interactively fitting a model to data, akin to the historically widely-used splot function in IRAF. pyspeckit employs the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method via the mpfit and lmfit implementations, and important assumptions regarding error estimation are described here. Wrappers to use pymc and emcee as optimizers are provided. A parallelized wrapper to fit lines in spectral cubes is included. As part of the astropy affiliated package ecosystem, pyspeckit is open source and open development and welcomes input and collaboration from the community.