Over the past couple of months we've put some effort into adding Python interfaces to the NDF, HDS and AST libraries. If you are interested you can find repositories at github: https://github.com/timj/starlink-pyast https://github.com/timj/starlink-pyndf These are works in progress but might be useful to people. Note that the API for the raw NDF/HDS access layer (as opposed to the "slurp it all into a numpy array") still needs tweaking a bit since I want to turn some method calls into attribute accessors. The AST interface has a fairly complete interface to Frames and Mappings but still needs to get Channels and Plot support. The NDF interface originally came from Tom Marsh. David Berry wrote the initial AST wrapper which I've augmented a bit. -- Tim Jenness Joint Astronomy Centre