Lightstack: A Python Package for Creating Photometric Data Cubes

Abstract

Multi-band photometry traces diverse physical processes across a wide range of wavelengths. In recent decades, this field has been driven by the rapid growth of multi-imaging datasets, from high-resolution observation from Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope to the forthcoming large-scale surveys enabled by the Roman Space Telescope and Rubin Observatory, for example. In this work, we present lightstack, a Python package for combining standalone images into photometric data cubes. The workflow consists of three main steps: cropping a region of interest from a mosaic across all available filters; stacking the images to construct the data cube; and performing PSF matching on the cube. This package is intended for preparing data for studies involving multi-band photometry. The code is released under an MIT license and is available on GitHub together with a Jupyter tutorial notebook. The version used for this publication (v0.2.1) is archived on Zenodo.