John Gill: Exploring the Milky Way with astropy, matplotlib and Gaia @ PyCon Ireland 2024

We are living at an incredible time for astronomy. Space based telescopes are providing large amounts of wonderful open data. python is central to the complex data processing and analysis that is happening through huge collaborations. The talk will focus on two personal python projects. The first, blume, is a general toolkit I used to help me working with matplotlib. It actually began it's life here in Dublin some 20 years ago, and was part of my introduction to matplotlib. The second is gotu, a project I started to help me explore the ideas in Professor Colin Rourke's book, The Geometry Of The Universe. It mostly consists of tools to visualise data with matplotlib and it uses blume. Three modules from gotu will be covered: gotu.jwst: a tool to download and view jwst data. gotu.gaia: a tool that downloads a subset of Gaia data and uses it to visualise the Milky Way's rotation curve: how the velocity of stars vary as you move out from the centre of the Milky Way. gotu.spiral: how the Sciama Principle and de Sitter Space can explain what we are seeing.