Quick Start

Installing astroQTpy

Install astroqtpy using pip:

$ pip install astroqtpy

(See the Installation page.)

Getting started

Importing the quadtree module

This is the main module in astroqtpy, which contains various quadtree classes for different purposes.

In a Python script or Jupyter notebook:

import astroqtpy.quadtree as qt

This should be all you need for most simple applications.

If you wish to define your own quadtree class with astroqtpy, you will need to import additional modules:

from astroqtpy.basetree import BaseTree
from astroqtpy.quadnode import QuadNode
from astroqtpy.quadpoint import QuadPoint

Instantiating a quadtree class

Once you’ve imported the quadtree module (or defined your own quadtree class), you must create an instance of a quadtree class. For example:

my_random_quadtree = qt.RandomQuadTree(0, 1, 0, 1)

For the RandomQuadTree class, at minimum you must specificy the lower and upper x and y limits for the quadtree. For a description of all optional arguments and other quadtree classes, please see the Detailed API Documentation.

Running a quadtree

Each quadtree class has two methods that you are most likely to use: run_quadtree() and draw_tree(). As the names imply, these methods act to run the quadtree algorithm forward, and plot the quadtree on a Matplotlib axis.

my_random_quadtree.run_quadtree()
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
my_random_quadtree.draw_tree(ax)

Learn more

To learn more, continue on to the Tutorials and check out the Detailed API Documentation.

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