Welcome to the healpy documentation

healpy is a Python package to handle pixelated data on the sphere. It is based on the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix) scheme and bundles the HEALPix C++ library.

HEALPix was developed to efficiently process Cosmic Microwave Background data from Cosmology experiments like BOOMERANG and WMAP but it is now used in other branches of Astrophysics to store data from all-sky surveys. The target audience used to be primarily the Cosmology scientific community but currently anyone interested in handling pixelated data on the sphere is very welcome to propose new features.

healpy provides utilities to:

  • convert between sky coordinates and pixel indices in HEALPix nested and ring schemes

  • find pixels within a disk, a polygon or a strip in the sky

  • apply coordinate transformations between Galactic, Ecliptic and Equatorial reference frames

  • apply custom rotations either to vectors or full maps

  • read and write HEALPix maps to disk in FITS format

  • upgrade and downgrade the resolution of existing HEALPix maps

  • visualize maps in Mollweide, Gnomonic and Cartographic projections

  • transform maps to Spherical Harmonics space and back using multi-threaded C++ routines

  • compute Auto and Cross Power Spectra from maps and create map realizations from spectra

Verbosity

Starting from 1.15.0, healpy uses the logging module instead of warnings. By default healpy will only print warnings and errors, to configure logging you can access the “healpy” logger with:

import logging
log = logging.getLogger("healpy")

configure the logging level (DEBUG restores the same logging messages of healpy <= 1.14):

log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

redirect the logs to the console:

handler = logging.StreamHandler()
log.addHandler(handler)

or customize their format:

log_format="%(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s"
formatter = logging.Formatter(log_format)
handler.setFormatter(formatter)

For more details see the Python documentation.

All the verbose keywords (except :py:func:remove_dipole) are now deprecated and will be removed in the future. You can disable deprecation warnings with:

import warnings
from astropy.utils.exceptions import AstropyDeprecationWarning
warnings.simplefilter('ignore', category=AstropyDeprecationWarning)

Changelog

Review the changes in each release in the CHANGELOG on Github.

Citing

  1. Cite the HEALPix and healpy papers, see the CITATION file in the repository.

  2. Add an acknowledgment statement: “Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the healpy and HEALPix packages”.

  3. at the first use of the HEALPix acronym, a footnote placed in the main body of the paper referring to the HEALPix web site, currently http://healpix.sf.net

Tutorial

Installation

Reference

Indices and tables

License