by Francesco Mauro

Nowadays, big sky surveys and the availability of large amount of photometric data are flooding astronomers with data, making relevant having tools to process their data in an efficient, accurate and easy way, minimizing reduction time. We introduce SkZpipe, a Python3 package designed to process generic data. This first version is designed to use the DAOPHOT suite (Stetson 1987) to perform point-spread function (PSF) fitting photometry. The photometric algorithms of this software have already demonstrated its accuracy and efficiency with the adaptation VVV-SkZ_pipeline (Mauro et al. 2013, included in the package) for the ``VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea'' ESO survey. The new versions are even improved, with a solid parallelism. The package helps the user also in the matching and stacking processes, avoiding repetitive interaction in all the operations, retaining all of the benefits of the power and accuracy of the photometric software, detaching them from the burden of data processing. This software provides not only a pipeline, but also all the tools to run easily each atomic step of the whole photometric procedure, from photometry to matching
the results, including the information retrieval from fits headers and an internal instrumental database. The following version will add the support to other photometric softwares (as SExtractor).