Healpy provides a python package to manipulate healpix maps. It is based on the standard numeric and visualisation tools for Python, Numpy and matplotlib.

To find find more information about Healpix, please visit its home page at http://healpix.jpl.nasa.gov/.

The documentation can be found at http://healpy.readthedocs.org, tutorial at http://healpy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html.

• pixelisation manipulation (ang2pix, pix2ang, etc.)
• spherical harmonic transforms (map2alm, alm2map, synfast, anafast, etc. both for temperature and polarisation)
• plotting capabilities (mollweide and gnomonic projection)
• reading and writing of Healpix FITS maps and alm

• Python, tested with 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7; however see bug for Python 2.4.
• Numpy (tested with version >=1.0.1)
• Matplotlib (tested with version >= 0.91.2 up to 1.0.1, please use latest version)
  • Note: Matplotlib 0.98.3 has a bug preventing mollview to work. Either correct the bug as indicated there or update to more recent version (>= 0.98.4).
• Python development package is required for some distribution (e.g., python-dev package for Ubuntu)
• PyFITS
  • Note: For healpix map Nside=8192, there is a bug in Numpy preventing pyfits to work. You should upgrade to latest pyfits version (>= 2.1) which provide a workaround.

The Healpix C++ library (from HEALPix 2.11 or HEALPix 2.20 for healpy >= 0.10) is included in the healpy package, so you don't need to get it separately.

The latest released version is 1.2 and is available as a source package at: https://github.com/healpy/healpy/tags

Project development takes place on github, http://github.com/healpy, please open an issue over there for reporting bugs or suggest improvements. Collaboration is very welcome, just fork the project on github and send pull requests back to the main repository.

see INSTALL

Use the online documentation, accessible with help() or using the ? in ipython.

Note that, as stated here publications based on work using the HEALPix software package should include both of the following:

1. an acknowledgment statement: "Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix (Górski et al., 2005) package". The complete reference is:

   Górski, K.M., E. Hivon, A.J. Banday, B.D. Wandelt, F.K. Hansen,

   M. Reinecke, and M. Bartelmann, HEALPix: A Framework for High-resolution Discretization and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere, Ap.J., 622, 759-771, 2005.

2. 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.jpl.nasa.gov

As healpy is based on HEALPix Software (the C++ library), the same condition applies to it.