Astronomers rely on statistical analysis all the time. The Python programming language has some excellent add-on packages for statistics. But sometimes the documentation isn’t as helpful in “real-world” scenarios. Prasanth Nair has posted a very nice tutorial on Simple Statistics with Python over at his blog. I highly recommend it for new users of python and anyone learning how to use statistics in their astronomical research. While you are there, poke around a bit as Prasanth’s blog has several other useful astro-python related tutorials including some on ephemeris and angle calculations.
Simple Statistics with Python | Comfort at 1 AU Blog
Another option to using python is the powerful and free statistical software R (http://cran.r-project.org/). There is loads of documentation, examples, and open source code for anyone to use. I would say a huge drawback to using R as an astronomer is that it does not have all the astronomy based functions that are commonly found in Python (but since it is community developed there could be). There are many great graphics packages as well (for example http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/).
And if you want to use R from Python you can do it with rpy(2):
http://rpy.sourceforge.net/