PyCPL allows an pythonic approach to access the ESO’s Common Pipeline Library (CPL) for astronomical data reduction. It provides Python interface to the powerful CPL library, while also allowing users and developers to take full advantage of the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem. In 2003 CPL was developed in C for its efficiency and speed of execution, and because of its maturity and widespread use, it is well tested and understood. With the community however moving away from C/C++ programming and embracing Python for data processing tasks, there is a need to provide access to the CPL utilities within the Python environment
With the latest version being released users can now install PyCPL to run existing CPL recipes (written in C) and access the results from Python.
It also provides the ability to create new recipes in Python using functionality provided by CPL.