viper (Velocity and IP EstimatoR) measures differential radial velocities from stellar spectra taken through iodine or other gas cells. It convolves the product of a stellar template and a gas cell spectrum with an instrumental profile. Via least square fitting, it optimizes the parameters of the instrumental profile, the wavelength solution, flux normalization, and the stellar Doppler shift. viper offers various functions to describe the instrumental profile such as Gaussian, super-Gaussian, skewed Gaussian or mixtures of Gaussians. The code is developed for echelle spectra; it can handle data from CES, CRIRES+, KECK, OES, TCES, and UVES, and additional instruments can easily be added. A graphical interface facilitates the work with numerous flexible options.

The PyA (PyAstronomy) suite of astronomy-related packages includes a convenient fitting package that provides support for minimization and MCMC sampling, a set of astrophysical models (e.g., transit light-curve modeling), and algorithms for timing analysis such as the Lomb-Scargle and the Generalized Lomb-Scargle periodograms.

The Lomb-Scargle periodogram is a common tool in the frequency analysis of unequally spaced data equivalent to least-squares fitting of sine waves. GLS is a solution for the generalization to a full sine wave fit, including an offset and weights (χ2 fitting). Compared to the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, GLS is superior as it provides more accurate frequencies, is less susceptible to aliasing, and gives a much better determination of the spectral intensity.