GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM) survey – I. A low-frequency extragalactic catalogue

We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the community, including support for domain-specific file formats such as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions. Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function (PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.

HEALPix -- the Hierarchical Equal Area iso-Latitude Pixelization -- is a versatile data structure with an associated library of computational algorithms and visualization software that supports fast scientific applications executable directly on very large volumes of astronomical data and large area surveys in the form of discretized spherical maps. Originally developed to address the data processing and analysis needs of the present generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments (e.g. BOOMERanG, WMAP), HEALPix can be expanded to meet many of the profound challenges that will arise in confrontation with the observational output of future missions and experiments, including e.g. Planck, Herschel, SAFIR, and the Beyond Einstein CMB polarization probe. In this paper we consider the requirements and constraints to be met in order to implement a sufficient framework for the efficient discretization and fast analysis/synthesis of functions defined on the sphere, and summarise how they are satisfied by HEALPix.