pySurvey provides some nice helper functions for people who work on redshift surveys, object catalogs, and visualization. It was built after many years of IDL so there is that.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pysurvey import plot
from pysurvey import catalog

for i,a in enumerate(x):
  plot.setup( (2,2,i), # i is assumed to be zero indexed
              xr=[0,10], xlabel='X Title',
              yr=[1,1E3], ylog=True, ylabel='Log Y axis',
              subtitle='subtitle', suptitle='Page title', title='plot title',
              autoTick=True)

Documentation soon:

• plot -- plotting routines
• polygon -- Mangle Polygons
• catalog -- fits catalog handling and loading
• util -- A nice set of utilities like spherematch and match

• pip install http://www.astro.rug.nl/software/kapteyn/kapteyn-2.2.tar.gz
• pip install git+https://github.com/leejjoon/pywcsgrid2.git
• pip install pywcs
• github install of pyfits