Ultraviolet photons from O and B stars strongly influence the structure and emission spectra of the interstellar medium. The UV photons energetic enough to ionize hydrogen (hν > 13.6 eV) will create the H II region around the star, but lower energy UV photons escape. These far-UV photons (6 eV < hν < 13.6 eV) are still energetic enough to photodissociate molecules and to ionize low ionization-potential atoms such as carbon, silicon, and sulfur. They thus create a photodissociation region (PDR) just outside the H II region. In aggregate, these PDRs dominate the heating and cooling of the neutral interstellar medium.

The PDR Toolbox is a science-enabling Python package for the community, designed to help astronomers determine the physical parameters of photodissociation regions from observations. Typical observations of both Galactic and extragalactic PDRs come from ground- and space-based millimeter, submillimeter, and far-infrared telescopes such as ALMA, SOFIA, JWST, Spitzer, and Herschel. Given a set of observations of spectral line or continuum intensities, PDR Toolbox can compute best-fit FUV incident intensity and cloud density based on our models of PDR emission.

MOPEX (MOsaicker and Point source EXtractor) is a package for reducing and analyzing imaging data, as well as MIPS SED data. MOPEX includes the point source extraction package, APEX.
MOPEX is designed to allow the user to:

• perform sophisticated background matching of individual data frames
• mosaic the individual frames downloaded from the Spitzer archive
• perform both temporal and spatial outlier rejection during mosaicking
• apply offline pointing refinement for MIPS data (refinement is already applied to IRAC data)
• perform source detection on the mosaics using APEX
• compute aperture photometry or PRF-fitting photometry for point sources
• perform interpolation, coaddition, and spectrum extraction of MIPS SED images.

CUBISM, written in IDL, constructs spectral cubes, maps, and arbitrary aperture 1D spectral extractions from sets of mapping mode spectra taken with Spitzer's IRS spectrograph. CUBISM is optimized for non-sparse maps of extended objects, e.g. the nearby galaxy sample of SINGS, but can be used with data from any spectral mapping AOR (primarily validated for maps which are designed as suggested by the mapping HOWTO).

The ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator makes it possible to process and edit astronomical science data in the FITS format to produce stunning images of the universe. Formerly a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, the current version of FITS Liberator is a stand-alone application and no longer requires Photoshop. This image processing software makes it possible to create color images using raw observations from a range of telescopes; the FITS Liberator continues to support the FITS and PDS formats, preferred by astronomers and planetary scientists respectively, which enables data to be processed from a wide range of telescopes and planetary probes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA’s XMM–Newton Telescope and Cassini–Huygens or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

PAHFIT is an IDL tool for decomposing Spitzer IRS spectra of PAH emission sources, with a special emphasis on the careful recovery of ambiguous silicate absorption, and weak, blended dust emission features. PAHFIT is primarily designed for use with full 5-35 micron Spitzer low-resolution IRS spectra. PAHFIT is a flexible tool for fitting spectra, and you can add or disable features, compute combined flux bands, change fitting limits, etc., without changing the code.

PAHFIT uses a simple, physically-motivated model, consisting of starlight, thermal dust continuum in a small number of fixed temperature bins, resolved dust features and feature blends, prominent emission lines (which themselves can be blended with dust features), as well as simple fully-mixed or screen dust extinction, dominated by the silicate absorption bands at 9.7 and 18 microns. Most model components are held fixed or are tightly constrained. PAHFIT uses Drude profiles to recover the full strength of dust emission features and blends, including the significant power in the wings of the broad emission profiles. This means the resulting feature strengths are larger (by factors of 2-4) than are recovered by methods which estimate the underlying continuum using line segments or spline curves fit through fiducial wavelength anchors.

SMART is an IDL-based software tool, developed by the IRS Instrument Team at Cornell University, that allows users to reduce and analyze Spitzer data from all four modules of the Infrared Spectrograph, including the peak-up arrays. The software is designed to make full use of the ancillary files generated in the Spitzer Science Center pipeline so that it can either remove or flag artifacts and corrupted data and maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in the extraction routines. It can be run in both interactive and batch modes. SMART includes visualization tools for assessing data quality, basic arithmetic operations for either two-dimensional images or one-dimensional spectra, extraction of both point and extended sources, and a suite of spectral analysis tools.

ICORE is a command-line driven co-addition, mosaicking, and resolution enhancement (HiRes) tool for creating science quality products from image data in FITS format and with World Coordinate System information following the FITS-WCS standard. It includes preparatory steps such as image background matching, photometric gain-matching, and pixel-outlier rejection. Co-addition and/or HiRes'ing can be performed in either the inertial WCS or in the rest frame of a moving object. Three interpolation methods are supported: overlap-area weighting, drizzle, and weighting by the detector Point Response Function (PRF). The latter enables the creation of matched-filtered products for optimal point-source detection, but most importantly allows for resolution enhancement using a spatially-dependent deconvolution method. This is a variant of the classic Richardson-Lucy algorithm with the added benefit to simultaneously register and co-add multiple images to optimize signal-to-noise and sampling of the instrumental PSF. It can assume real (or otherwise "flat") image priors, mitigate "ringing" artifacts, and assess the quality of image solutions using statistically-motivated convergence criteria. Uncertainties are also estimated and internally validated for all products. The software supports multithreading that can be configured for different architectures. Numerous example scripts are included (with test data) to co-add and/or HiRes image data from Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS, WISE, and Herschel-SPIRE.

Written in c, the Customizable User Pipeline for IRS Data (CUPID) allows users to run the Spitzer IRS Pipelines to re-create Basic Calibrated Data and extract calibrated spectra from the archived raw files. CUPID provides full access to all the parameters of the BCD, COADD, BKSUB, BKSUBX, and COADDX pipelines, as well as the opportunity for users to provide their own calibration files (e.g., flats or darks). CUPID is available for Mac, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.

Bandmerge takes in ASCII tables of positions and fluxes of detected astronomical sources in 2-7 different wavebands, and write out a single table of the merged data. The tool was designed to work with source lists generated by the Spitzer Science Center's MOPEX (ascl:1111.006) software, although it can be "fooled" into running on other data as well.

IRSFRINGE is an IDL-based GUI package that allows observers to interactively remove fringes from IRS spectra. Fringes that originate from the detector subtrates are observed in the IRS Short-High (SH) and Long-High (LH) modules. In the Long-Low (LL) module, another fringe component is seen as a result of the pre-launch change in one of the LL filters. The fringes in the Short-Low (SL) module are not spectrally resolved. the fringes are already largely removed in the pipeline processing when the flat field is applied. However, this correction is not perfect and remaining fringes can be removed with IRSFRINGE from data in each module. IRSFRINGE is available as a stand-alone package and is also part of the Spectroscopic Modeling, Analysis and Reduction Tool (SMART, ascl:1210.021).

STARRY computes light curves for various applications in astronomy: transits and secondary eclipses of exoplanets, light curves of eclipsing binaries, rotational phase curves of exoplanets, light curves of planet-planet and planet-moon occultations, and more. By modeling celestial body surface maps as sums of spherical harmonics, STARRY does all this analytically and is therefore fast, stable, and differentiable. Coded in C++ but wrapped in Python, STARRY is easy to install and use.

The SPICE (Spacecraft Planet Instrument C-matrix [“Camera matrix”] Events) toolkit offers a set of building blocks for constructing tools supporting multi-mission, international space exploration programs and research in planetary science, heliophysics, Earth science, and for observations from terrestrial observatories. It computes many kinds of observation geometry parameters, including the ephemerides, orientations, sizes, and shapes of planets, satellites, comets and asteroids. It can also compute the orientation of a spacecraft, its various moving structures, and an instrument's field-of-view location on a planet's surface or atmosphere. It can determine when a specified geometric event occurs, such as when an object is in shadow or is in transit across another object. The SPICE toolkit is available in FORTRAN 77, ANSI C, IDL, and MATLAB.

sbpy, an Astropy affiliated package, supplements functionality provided by Astropy (ascl:1304.002) with functions and methods that are frequently used for planetary astronomy with a clear focus on asteroids and comets. It offers access tools for various databases for orbital and physical data, spectroscopy analysis tools and models, photometry models for resolved and unresolved observations, ephemerides services, and other tools useful for small-body planetary astronomy.