This is a guest post by Erik Tollerud, a member of the Astropy Coordination Committee and a Hubble Fellow at Yale University. His research focuses on Local Group dwarf galaxies and their connections to cosmology.
In November 2013, we published the second public release (v0.3) of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy. Astropy is a community-driven package intended to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python. New and improved functionality in this release includes:
- A new modeling package which provides a framework for fitting models to data
- Quantity has been re-implemented as a numpy array subclass, enhancing performance and usability.
- Unit conversion and Quantities are better integrated with other parts of Astropy, simplifying many APIs and user code.
- New Table functionality for joining and aggregating tables
- Support for arrays of celestial coordinates
- A new virtual observatory cone search package
- A dedicated convolution sub-package with many predefined kernels
A full list of improvements, including examples, is provided here. We provide installation instructions for Astropy as well as extensive documentation. Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository. For help working with Astropy, feel free to post to the astropy mailing list. Other help resources are listed on the web site.
Over 50 developers have contributed code to Astropy so far, and you can find out more about the team behind Astropy here.
If you use Astropy directly—or as a dependency to another package—for your work, please remember to include the following acknowledgment at the end of papers:
This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2013).
where “(Astropy Collaboration, 2013)” is the Astropy paper.
In the near future, we will use this version of astropy as a starting point for a series of tutorials on how to use Astropy for common astronomy needs. Stay tuned!