Astropy v2.0 Released!
Dear colleagues,
We are very happy to announce the v2.0 release of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy:
Astropy is a community-driven Python package intended to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for astronomy and astrophysics.
New and improved major functionality in this release includes:
- Most models now support parameters having units (i.e., being Quantity objects).
- A new CCDData class that is directly useful for typical astronomical images and implements the NDData interface.
- Coordinate frame objects can now carry proper motions and radial velocities, and will carry them through and transform them between frames. (This functionality is experimental and feedback is greatly desired.)
- Many of the typical mixin columns for astropy tables can now be saved into ECSV files and fully round-tripped.
- The fft and direct versions of the convolution algorithm in astropy.convolution are now more consistent and work better with typical use cases.
- A variety of additions to the astropy.stats subpackage
In addition, hundreds of smaller improvements and fixes have been made. An overview of the changes is provided at:
http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/2.0.html
Note that the Astropy 2.x series will be the last versions of Astropy that will support Python 2.x. Future versions of Astropy will only support Python 3.x.
Instructions for installing Astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at:
If you make use of the Anaconda Python Distribution, you can update to Astropy v2.0 with:
conda update astropy
Whereas if you usually use pip, you can do:
pip install astropy --upgrade
Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository:
https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues
Over 232 developers have contributed code to Astropy so far, and you can find out more about the team behind Astropy here:
http://www.astropy.org/team.html
Astropy v2.0 now repaces v1.0 as the long term support release, and will be supported until the end of 2019. The next major release of Astropy (scheduled for January 2018) will only support Python 3.x. So if you need to use Astropy in a very stable environment in Python 2.7, you should continue to use the 2.0.x series after 3.0.x is released.
If you use Astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to another package, 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 a citation to the Astropy Paper (ADS - BibTeX).
Special thanks to the coordinator for this release: Brigitta Sipocz.
We hope that you enjoy using Astropy as much as we enjoyed developing it!
Erik Tollerud, Tom Robitaille, Kelle Cruz, and Tom Aldcroft
on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration