Welcome to Sherpa’s documentation

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Welcome to the Sherpa documentation. Sherpa is a Python package for modeling and fitting data. It was originally developed by the Chandra X-ray Center for use in analysing X-ray data (both spectral and imaging) from the Chandra X-ray telescope, but it is designed to be a general-purpose package, which can be enhanced with domain-specific tasks (such as X-ray Astronomy). Sherpa contains an expressive and powerful modeling language, coupled with a range of statistics and robust optimisers.

See also

If you are looking for the similarly named package “SHERPA” for hyperparameter tuning of machine learning models go here: https://parameter-sherpa.readthedocs.io/

Sherpa is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and is compatible with Python versions 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. It is expected that it will work with Python 3.8 but testing has been limited. Information on recent releases and citation information for Sherpa is available using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.5281/zenodo.593753.

The last version of Sherpa compatible with Python 2.7 was the 4.11.1 release.

At present there is no developer mailing list for Sherpa.