ndcube: Manipulating N-dimensional Astronomical Data in Python

Authors: Daniel F. Ryan, Stuart Mumford, Yash Sharma, Ankit Kumar Baruah, Adwait Bhope, Nabil Freij, Laura A. Hayes, Will T. Barnes, Baptiste Pellorce, Richard O’Steen, D. Homeier, J. Marcus Hughes, David Stansby, Albert Y. Shih, Matthew J. West - The Journal of Open Source Software 2023 cited by 5

ndcube is a free, open-source, community-developed Python package for inspecting, manipulating, and visualizing n-dimensional coordinate-aware astronomical data.Its features are agnostic to the number of data dimensions and the physical coordinate types they represent.Its data classes link data and their coordinates and provide analysis methods to manipulate them self-consistently.These aim to provide simple and intuitive ways of handling coordinate-aware data, analogous to how users handle coordinate-agnostic data with arrays.ndcube requires that coordinate transformations be expressed via the World Coordinate System (WCS), a coordinate framework commonly used throughout astronomy.The WCS framework has multiple implementations (e.g.FITS-WCS, gWCS, and others), each with a different incompatible API, which makes workflows and derived tools non-transferable between implementations.ndcube overcomes this by leveraging Astropy's WCS API (APE-14, Robitaille et al., 2018) which can be wrapped around any underlying WCS implementation.This enables ndcube to use the same API to interact with any set of WCS transformations.ndcube's data-WCS coupling allows users to analyze their data more easily and reliably, thus helping to boost their scientific output.