svo_filters

The Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO) Filter Profile Service is a great resource for homogenized photometric filter curves and metadata. With svo_filters, I tried to create a lightweight and flexible package to incorporate these filters into Python applications.

Installation

To install svo_filters, do:

pip install svo_filters

Alternatively, you can clone from Github with:

git clone https://github.com/hover2pi/svo_filters.git
python svo_filters/setup.py install

Load a Photometric Filter

The actual filters are stored locally as XML files and can be viewed with:

from svo_filters import svo
svo.filters()

To create a filter object, pass a bandpass name to the svo.Filter() class:

H_band = svo.Filter('2MASS.H')

You can see some information about the filter with:

H_band.info()

And you can plot the bandpass like so:

H_band.plot()
Filter bandpass

Load a Grism

Filters can also be binned arbitrarily, for use with grisms. We can pass integers to the n_bins or pixels_per_bin arguments to specify the number of wavelength bins or pixels per bin, respectively:

G141 = svo.Filter('WFC3_IR.G141', n_bins=15)
Filter bandpass

Apply a Filter to a Spectrum

Filters can be applied to a spectrum by passing a sequence of [W, F] or [W, F, E] with astropy units to the apply() method:

filtered = G141.apply(spec, plot=True)
Filter bandpass

Contents

A Python wrapper for the SVO Filter Profile Service