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> Topcat
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Topcat

Does what you want with astronomical catalogues and tables. Quite simply one of the most useful pieces of astronomical software you will ever use. It has hardly left my desktop for nearly five years. Evangelist propaganda and a tutorial on my USyd. Astroinformatics 2011 page.

Python

I use Python on a daily basis for manipulating and analysing data, plotting and number crunching. Compared to other scripting languages such as Perl (which I used for 2 years prior), it has a cleaner, more readable syntax (never write another { or ; again!) and great numeric, scientific and plotting modules.

Here are some of the great tools available to the Python astronomical community. I am in the middle of writing my own set of tools which will be useful to me during my thesis. In due course I will post them here in case others find them useful:

Mac

I'm a bit of a Mac addict. If you want a powerful, user-friendly, compatible and visually pleasant platform to do science on, I think you can't go past the Mac. No blue screens of death, RAM hogging system processes, clunky user interfaces or driver issues. Things just work. Plus the hardware looks stunning and you can run Python. Enough said.