After telescopes observe, the data must be carefully processed so that it can be analysed. Modern astronomical instruments are complex, multi-million dollar pieces of equipment, but without good processing this investment is useless.
To exploit data from the SPHERE high-contrast imager, amongst others, I developed the precision infrared pipeline. It is written in pure python, relying heavily on the numpy and scipy packages. It is competitive with the official pipeline, and has produced high-quality images of the massive evolved star VX Sgr. Development of precision continues to increase the speed, add more features and support data from more modes and instruments.
Peter Scicluna 