Python for gamma-ray astronomy

<p>Gamma-ray astronomy is a relatively new window on the cosmos. The first source detected from the ground was the Crab nebula, seen by the Whipple telescope in Arizona in 1989. Today, about 150 sources have been detected at TeV energies using gamma-ray telescopes from the ground such as H.E.S.S. in Namibia or VERITAS in Arizona, and about 3000 sources at GeV energies using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.</p> <p>Soon construction will start for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), which will be the first ground-based gamma-ray telescope array operated as an open observatory, with a site in the southern and a second site in the northern hemisphere.</p> <p>In this presentation I will give a very brief introduction to gamma-ray astronomy and data analysis, as well as a short overview of the software used for the various missions. The main focus will be on recent attempts to build open-source gamma-ray software on the scientific Python stack and Astropy: ctapipe as a CTA Python pipeline prototype, Fermipy and the Fermi Science Tools for Fermi-LAT analysis, Gammapy as a community-developed gamma-ray Python package and naima as a non-thermal spectral modeling and fitting package.