Starlight Toolkit

A set of tools to manage the Starlight spectral synthesis code.

Starlight (Cid Fernandes et al. 2005) is one the most widely used full spectral fitting codes in astronomy. Here we provide a pythonic toolbox to organize the output of Starlight and calculate value-added data products.

Please take a look at the quickstart guide and go over the main use cases.

Installation

starlight_toolkit can be install with pip!

pip install starlight_toolkit

Features

• This package will allow you to easily read and organize the huge fortrankenstinish ascii files generated by Starlight, because life in the 21st century is already hard enough as it is.

  To read an output file:

  from starlight_toolkit.output import read_output_file
  
  starlight_output = read_output_file('../test_data/NGC_0855_pho.out')
  

  Two sample output files are available in the test_data directory of this repository, and you can use them to explore.

  The output is a dictionary with header information and astropy tables containing the fitted model and the results of spectral decomposition.

• The post_processing module includes tools to calculate the star-formation history, average ages and metallicities and more.

• The plotting module contains building blocks for you to create your own plots and.

• The synphot module allows you to perform synthetic photometry on models generated by Starlight.

• The dust module implements several extinction and attenuation curves and allows you to correct spectra and photometry for the effects of MW dust.