Installation Guide | readthedocs | Introduction on Colab | HowToLens
When two or more galaxies are aligned perfectly down our line-of-sight, the background galaxy appears multiple times.
This is called strong gravitational lensing and PyAutoLens makes it simple to model strong gravitational lenses, using JAX to accelerate lens modeling on GPUs.
The following human-readable documentation and examples are useful for new starters:
- The PyAutoLens readthedocs: which includes an overview of PyAutoLens's core features, a new user starting guide and an installation guide.
- The introduction Jupyter Notebook on Google Colab: try PyAutoLens in a web browser (without installation).
- The autolens_workspace GitHub repository: example scripts covering every PyAutoLens use case.
- The HowToLens GitHub repository: a Jupyter notebook lecture series teaching strong lensing and lens modeling from the ground up.
The PyAutoLens AI Assistant lets you do gravitational lensing science in natural language from inside an AI coding agent. You can get started simply by asking it a question about gravitational lensing or describing the task you would like to perform with PyAutoLens. See the autolens_assistant GitHub page for its full scope and instructions.
The assistant runs inside an AI coding agent: Claude Code or Codex are recommended. Sustained scientific use normally needs paid access to one of them (a personal subscription, institutional access or API billing). OpenCode is an experimental alternative whose client is free but whose model access, cost and capability depend on the provider. Browser chat routes (ChatGPT or Claude with a GitHub connector) are no longer supported.
Questions, help with your code or your analysis, and ideas: the PyAutoLabs Discussions. Bug reports with a reproducer (a snippet, the traceback, your versions): an issue on the library's tracker. The Slack is for collaborators, by invitation.
The collaborator Slack workspace shares project updates and discussions about gravitational lensing analysis.
For users less familiar with gravitational lensing, Bayesian inference and scientific analysis you may wish to read through the HowToLens lectures. These teach you the basic principles of gravitational lensing and Bayesian inference, with the content pitched at undergraduate level and above.
A complete overview of the lectures is provided on the HowToLens readthedocs page, and the notebooks themselves live in the PyAutoLabs/HowToLens repository.
Information on how to cite PyAutoLens in publications can be found on the citations page.
Information on how to contribute to PyAutoLens can be found on the contributing page.
Hands on support for contributions is available via our Slack workspace, again please email to request an invite.
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