The Astropy project is a common effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy that brings together almost 100 developers from around the world.
Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in, and many more components being worked on. In particular, we are developing imaging, photometric, and spectroscopic functionality, as well as frameworks for cosmology, unit handling, and coordinate transformations. A first stable release is tentatively scheduled for early May.
Stay updated by following @astropy on Twitter, or sign up to the astropy mailing list!
If you are interested in finding out more about the Astropy project, you can read the original vision for the package.
The documentation for the latest development version of Astropy can be found at http://astropy.readthedocs.org. This documentation is automatically updated any time a commit is made to the Astropy repository. Once a stable version of Astropy is released, we will provide links to the documentation for that version.
Detailed installation instructions are provided in the documentation, but we have included a simplified version here.
Astropy requires Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.1, or 3.2, and Numpy 1.4 or later. You can install the latest developer version of Astropy using:
git clone http://github.com/astropy/astropy.git
cd astropy
python setup.py install
Once a stable version of Astropy is released, we will provide links to the tar file, and updated installation instructions!
You can check that astropy is correctly installed by starting up python or ipython, and importing astropy:
>>> import astropy
If you do not get any errors, the installation was successful!
If you want to discuss issues with other Astropy users and with the developers, you can sign up to the astropy mailing list!
If you have come across something that you believe is a bug, please open a ticket in the Astropy issue tracker, and we will look into it promptly!