Astropy v6.0 Released!#

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v6.0 release of astropy, a core Python package for Astronomy:

The astropy core package is a community-driven Python package intended to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for astronomy and astrophysics. It is part of the Astropy Project, which aims to foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages for Python.

New and improved major functionality in this release includes:

  • Define Geodetic and Bodycentric Representations via their geometric parameters

  • Body-fixed planetary reference frames and their WCS description

  • Support for Numpy broadcasting over frame data and attributes

  • Updates to cosmology

  • Updates to how IERS data are handled

  • Masked Time values now use Masked arrays internally

  • Reading and writing VO model annotations

  • TimeDelta string format “quantity_str”

  • VOTable now supports PARQUET serialization

  • Faster FITS file decompression

  • New GeneralSersic2D model

In addition, hundreds of smaller improvements and fixes have been made. An overview of the changes is provided at:

     https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/6.0.html

Instructions for installing astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at:

     https://docs.astropy.org

If you usually use pip/vanilla Python, you can do:

pip install astropy --upgrade

If you make use of the Anaconda Python Distribution, soon you will be able update to Astropy v6.0 with:

conda update astropy

Or if you cannot wait for Anaconda to update their default version, you can use the conda-forge channel:

conda update -c conda-forge astropy

Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository:

     astropy/astropy#issues

Over 490 people have contributed code to the core astropy package so far, and you can find out more about the team here:

     https://www.astropy.org/team.html

If you use astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to another package, please remember to acknowledge it by citing the appropriate Astropy paper. For the most up-to-date suggestions, see the acknowledgment page.

We hope that you enjoy using astropy as much as we enjoyed developing it!

Simon Conseil
v6.0 Release Coordinator
on behalf of The Astropy Project