idies/SpecDash: SpecDash Alpha 0.2.0

SpecDash is an application for displaying and analyzing astronomical spectra, available as a stand-alone website (http://specdash.idies.jhu.edu), as well as an interactive or programmable widget freely installable in Jupyter notebooks, and currently deployed in the SciServer science platform (www.sciserver.org). Users can load and compare multiple spectra at the same time, smooth them with several kernels, overlay error bars, spectral masks and lines, and show individual exposure frames, sky background and model spectra. For modeling, spectral regions can be interactively selected for fitting the continuum or spectral lines with several predefined models, and spectral smoothing can be performed with with several kernels. For reproducibility, all spectra and models can be downloaded, shared, and then uploaded again by other users. Although the web-based version shares the same functionality as the Jupyter widget version, the latter has the advantage that users can use the SpecDash python library to programmatically load any kind of spectra, and analyze or model them using their own models and kernels.

This release includes a new input driver for PFS.