🎊 Confitti 🎊 - for Conics Fitting

Fit conic sections (ellipse, parabola, hyperbola) to a set of points

See the presentation

Installation

pip install confitti

or

uv pip install confitti

will install the package plus the required dependencies (numpy, scipy, lmfit).

Optional dependencies, which are used in the example notebooks, may be pip-installed separately:

• emcee for MCMC sampling
• matplotlib, seaborn, and corner for plotting
• astropy and regions for dealing with celestial coordinates

Usage

See the example jupyter notebooks in the notebooks directory. For example,

• demo01-basic.ipynb demonstrates basic usage: finding the best-fit parabola (or general conic) to a set of (x, y) points
• demo02-emcee.ipynb explores uncertainty in the parameters of the best-fit curve by means of mcmc
• demo03-proplyd.ipynb is an example application to real astronomical data (HST image of a bow shock in the Orion Nebula)

Prior art

This is the successor project to circle-fit

Some of the literature on the topic of fitting conic sections to points is described here.