daschlab: The DASCH Data Analysis Package

daschlab is a Python package that assists with the retrieval and astrophysical analysis of data from DASCH, the project to scan Harvard College Observatory’s collection of astronomical glass plates. daschlab provides access to hundreds of terabytes of scientific data documenting the history of the entire night sky over the years ~1880–1990.

This website contains only the Python API reference material. For tutorials and howtos, see the DASCH DR7 documentation.

This package is designed for primarily interactive usage in a JupyterLab environment, although it fully supports non-interactive uses as well. The most important item provided in the main module is the Session class, which defines a daschlab analysis session. Obtain a session by calling the open_session() function:

from daschlab import open_session

sess = open_session(".")

Virtually all subsequent analysis occurs through actions connected to an initialized Session instance.

The version of daschlab described by this documentation has a DOI of xx.xxxx/dev-build.daschlab.version. You can obtain the DOI of the version of daschlab that you are running via the get_version_doi function. This DOI should be reported in scholarly publications that made use of daschlab. See How to Cite DASCH for more information.

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Getting help

If you run into any issues when using daschlab, please review the DASCH DR7 documentation, inquire with the DASCH Astrophysics email group or open an issue on its GitHub repository.