pcigale: porting Code Investigating Galaxy Emission to Python

Abstract

We present pcigale, the port to Python of CIGALE (Code Investigating Galaxy Emission) a Fortran spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting code developed at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille. After recalling the specifics of the SED fitting method, we show the gains in modularity and versatility offered by Python, as well as the drawbacks compared to the compiled code.