Short description:

Python Experiments in Physics and Astronomy acts as a resource for science and engineering students or faculty who would like to see how a diverse selection of topics can be analyzed and simulated using Python programs.

Long description:

Python Experiments in Physics and Astronomy acts as a resource for science and engineering students or faculty who would like to see how a diverse selection of topics can be analyzed and simulated using Python programs. The book also provides Python solutions that can be learned from and modified as needed. The book is mainly aimed at undergraduates, but since many science students and faculty have limited exposure to scientific programming, having a collection of examples that address curve-fitting, Fast Fourier Transforms, image photometry and image alignment, and many others could be very helpful not just for learning from, but also to support classroom projects and demonstrations.

Key Features:

• Features tutorials using Python for non-computer science students and faculty involved with scientific programming


• Contains complete scientific programming examples for teaching and academic projects


• Presents detailed Python solutions for Physics and Astronomy topics, not normally covered in depth, because they would be too time-consuming

At last, an invaluable collection of software templates for practical problems in physics and astronomy written for students in the Python universe.  Applications to aerodynamics, rocketry, and data fitting create a brilliant and rarely found merging across the boundaries of science and engineering.  With tutorials, examples, and solutions, faculty will find this book to be an indispensable classroom resource for students at all levels.

- Richard Binzel, Professor of Planetary Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), March 2025

The leap from simple elegant equations in the physics classroom to deep physical intuition about the workings of complex systems requires experience and experimentation. In "Python Experiments in Physics and Astronomy", Padraig Houlahan provides a series of virtual laboratories in which the reader begins with a simple equation and uses it to explore complex behaviors.  The combination of object-oriented programming structure with concrete physical situations allows the reader to intuitively modify the presented code and construct new experiments while building intuition for how each system works.  Furthermore, Houlahan's examples provide the foundations for understanding how professional level software tools perform their calculations (e.g. the astronomical imaging chapters here demonstrate the underpinnings of the AstroPy image processing packages). This book is a must-have for science and engineering students both to gain physical intuition in a virtual laboratory setting and to develop basic skills in scientific computing.

- Timothy Ellsworth-Bowers, Support Astronomer, Lowell Discovery Telescope, Lowell Observatory, April 2025

Table of Contents:

1. Python and Object Oriented Design Notes. 2. Exploring Data. 3. Signals and Trends. 4. Gravity Fields and Mass Distributions. 5. Spiral Galaxies and Dark Matter. 6. Sampling a Distribution. 7. Projectiles ? The German 88. 8. Rocket Launches. 9. Building a star catalog from an image. 10. Photometry: Measuring object brightness. 11. Aligning Images and Finding Targets. 12. The Saha Equation and the Balmer Spectrum. 13. Isochrons ? The Ages of Rocks.