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sdss-plates is a small collection of python software used to generate supplementary educational materials for the SDSS Plates for Education program.

Dependencies

sdss-plates depends on the following external libraries:

• numpy
• matplotlib
• montage (and montage-wrapper)
• aplpy (though portions that depend do not work very well)
• gz2tools (my own code)
• astropy.table
• pandas
• mpld3

More dependencies (such as basemap) may be added n the future to make things work better

Basic Functionality

• get FITS images of the field covered by the plate (plate_img.retrieve_ugr(...), plate_img.make_SDSS_FITSFigure(...) -- depends on aplpy and works only okay)
• make a cutout of the field with the plate extent denoted and different kinds of objects plotted in the field (plate_img.make_SDSS_field_cutout(...))
• make an html image with clickable links to individual objects on SkyServer (make_SDSS_field_mpld3(...) -- depends on mpld3)
• demo on plate 4385 here

Known Issues

• Currently, figures are low-res, due to thumbnail size limit. It would be nice to integrate aplpy properly, so montage could fetch everything and make things look nice
• Would also be nice to have AVM data on thumbnails