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Welcome to ASTRA

This is the documentation of Astrophysical Spectral Tools for Retrieval & Analysis (ASTRA), with a standard implementation of:

  • Access to stellar spectra from multiple state-of-the-art spectrographs
  • Construction of telluric masks, based on the observations with the worst atmospheric conditions
  • Construction of high-SNR stellar templates from the available observations

ASTRA is now working as the low-level data-interface of the s-BART pipeline for RV extraction and it also allows for:

  • Built-in normalization of stellar spectra
  • Built-in interpolation of stellar spectra to new wavelength grids
  • Smoothing of stellar spectra

ASTRA supports the 2D stellar spectra format for all supported instruments (S2D_A, S2D_BLAZE_A, S2D_TELL_CORR_A,S2D_TELL_CORR_BLAZE_A for the ESO-based pipelines) and in some cases the S1D format.

Installation

ASTRA is currently available in python 3.11 and python 3.12, and it can be installed either through Pypi or github:

pip install ASTRA-spectra

git clone git@github.com:Kamuish/ASTRA.git
cd ASTRA
pip install .

By default, ASTRA does not install Telfit as it will only be needed for the masking of the telluric features. If this is the goal, it must be installed manually.

Issues and contribution

Management of any issues to the code, as well as external contribution is done through the github repository

Troubleshooting

Installation of TelFit

Depending on the python version that is in use, the installation of TelFit might not be straightforward. For the currently ASTRA_supported python versions, one can apply the following steps to install Telfit:

  1. Download TelFit from github 
    git clone https://github.com/kgullikson88/Telluric-Fitter
cd Telluric-Fitter
  2. Ensure that the "develop" libraries for the selected python version are installated. For Fedora, this would be 
    dnf install python3.11-devel
  3. Install necessary python libraries for TelFit installation 
    pip install cython requests numpy pysynphot lockfile fortranformat
  4. Install Telfit through 
    python setup.py install

Changelog

V1.2.3 (5th December 2025)

  1. Addition of new routines to oversample the stellar template
  2. Sanity check of the input observations, ensuring that they match the expected format

V1.1.0 (2nd July 2025)

  1. Addition of new interpolation algorithms
  2. Inclusion of interface to SPIROU simulated data
  3. Added BERV_factor to ESO pipelines
  4. Improvement of data interface to iterate over template construction

V1.0.0 (5th of May 2025)

  • Original commit, as transposed from sBART internals
  • Addition of CARMENES and MAROON-X as valid instruments for analysis