astroplan is a flexible toolbox for observation planning and scheduling. It is powered by Astropy (ascl:1304.002); it works for Python beginners and new observers, and is powerful enough for observatories preparing nightly and long-term schedules as well. It calculates rise/set/meridian transit times, alt/az positions for targets at observatories anywhere on Earth, and offers built-in plotting convenience functions for standard observation planning plots (airmass, parallactic angle, sky maps). It can also determine the observability of sets of targets given an arbitrary set of constraints (i.e., altitude, airmass, moon separation/illumination, etc.).

aesop (ARC Echelle Spectroscopic Observation Pipeline) analyzes echelle spectra for observations made by the Astrophysics Research Consortium (ARC) Echelle Spectrograph on the ARC 3.5 m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory. It is a high resolution spectroscopy software toolkit that picks up where the traditional IRAF reduction scripts leave off, and offers blaze function normalization by polynomial fits to observations of early-type stars, a robust least-squares normalization method, and radial velocity measurements (or offset removals) via cross-correlation with model spectra, including barycentric radial velocity calculations. It also concatenates multiple echelle orders into a simple 1D spectrum and provides approximate flux calibration.

fleck simulates rotational modulation of stars due to starspots and is used to overcome the degeneracies and determine starspot coverages accurately for a sample of young stars. The code simulates starspots as circular dark regions on the surfaces of rotating stars, accounting for foreshortening towards the limb, and limb darkening. Supplied with the latitudes, longitudes, and radii of spots and the stellar inclinations from which each star is viewed, fleck takes advantage of efficient array broadcasting with numpy to return approximate light curves. For example, the code can compute rotational modulation curves sampled at ten points throughout the rotation of each star for one million stars, with two unique spots each, all viewed at unique inclinations, in about 10 seconds on a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor. This rapid computation of light curves en masse makes it possible to measure starspot distributions with techniques such as Approximate Bayesian Computation.

PIPE (PSF Imagette Photometric Extraction) extracts PSF (point-spread function) photometry from data acquired by the space telescope CHEOPS (CHaracterisation of ExOPlanetS). Advantages of PSF photometry over standard aperture photometry include reduced sensitivity to contaminants such as background stars, cosmic ray hits, and hot/bad pixels. For CHEOPS, an additional advantage is that photometry can be extracted from an imagette, a small window around the target that is downlinked at a shorter cadence than the larger-sized subarray used for aperture photometry. These advantages make PIPE particularly well suited for targets brighter or fainter than the nominal G = 7-11 mag range of CHEOPS, i.e., where short-cadence imagettes are available (bright end) or when contamination becomes a problem (faint end). Within the nominal range, PIPE usually offers no advantage over the standard aperture photometry.