Widgets and Astropy: Accomplishing Productive Research with Undergraduates

This paper describes a tool for astronomical research implemented as an IPython notebook with a widget interface. The notebook uses Astropy, a community-developed package of fundamental tools for astronomy, and Astropy affiliated packages, as the back end. The widget interface makes Astropy a much more useful tool to undergraduates or other non-experts doing research in astronomy, filling a niche for software that connects beginners to research-grade code.