This is an implementation of a fairly simple-minded luminosity distance fitter, intended for use with supernova data. The calculational technique is based on evaluating the $chi^2$ of the model fit on a grid and marginalization over various nuisance parameters. Of course, the nature of these things is that this code has gotten steadily more complex, so perhaps the simple moniker is no longer justified.

SiFTO is an empirical method for modeling Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) light curves by manipulating a spectral template. We make use of high-redshift SN data when training the model, allowing us to extend it bluer than rest-frame U. This increases the utility of our high-redshift SN observations by allowing us to use more of the available data. We find that when the shape of the light curve is described using a stretch prescription, applying the same stretch at all wavelengths is not an adequate description. SiFTO therefore uses a generalization of stretch which applies different stretch factors as a function of both the wavelength of the observed filter and the stretch in the rest-frame B band. SiFTO has been compared to other published light-curve models by applying them to the same set of SN photometry, and it's been demonstrated that SiFTO and SALT2 perform better than the alternatives when judged by the scatter around the best-fit luminosity distance relationship. When SiFTO and SALT2 are trained on the same data set the cosmological results agree.

This module is a plug-in for CosmoMC and requires that software. Though programmed to analyze SNLS3 SN data, it can also be used for other SN data provided the inputs are put in the right form. In fact, this is probably a good idea, since the default treatment that comes with CosmoMC is flawed. Note that this requires fitting two additional SN nuisance parameters (alpha and beta), but this is significantly faster than attempting to marginalize over them internally.

emcee is an extensible, pure-Python implementation of Goodman & Weare's Affine Invariant Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Ensemble sampler. It's designed for Bayesian parameter estimation. The algorithm behind emcee has several advantages over traditional MCMC sampling methods and has excellent performance as measured by the autocorrelation time (or function calls per independent sample). One advantage of the algorithm is that it requires hand-tuning of only 1 or 2 parameters compared to $sim N^2$ for a traditional algorithm in an N-dimensional parameter space. Exploiting the parallelism of the ensemble method, emcee permits any user to take advantage of multiple CPU cores without extra effort.

Astropy provides a common framework, core package of code, and affiliated packages for astronomy in Python. Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in. Astropy is intended to contain much of the core functionality and some common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python.

Mbb_emcee fits modified blackbodies to photometry data using an affine invariant MCMC. It has large number of options which, for example, allow computation of the IR luminosity or dustmass as part of the fit. Carrying out a fit produces a HDF5 output file containing the results, which can either be read directly, or read back into a mbb_results object for analysis. Upper and lower limits can be imposed as well as Gaussian priors on the model parameters. These additions are useful for analyzing poorly constrained data. In addition to standard Python packages scipy, numpy, and cython, mbb_emcee requires emcee (ascl:1303.002), Astropy (ascl:1304.002), h5py, and for unit tests, nose.

Uvmcmcfit fits parametric models to interferometric data. It is ideally suited to extract the maximum amount of information from marginally resolved observations with interferometers like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), Submillimeter Array (SMA), and Plateau de Bure Interferometer (PdBI). uvmcmcfit uses emcee (ascl:1303.002) to do Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and can measure the goodness of fit from visibilities rather than deconvolved images, an advantage when there is strong gravitational lensing and in other situations. uvmcmcfit includes a pure-Python adaptation of Miriad’s (ascl:1106.007) uvmodel task to generate simulated visibilities given observed visibilities and a model image and a simple ray-tracing routine that allows it to account for both strongly lensed systems (where multiple images of the lensed galaxy are detected) and weakly lensed systems (where only a single image of the lensed galaxy is detected).