Dear colleagues, We are very happy to announce the v3.1 release of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy:
http://www.astropy.org Astropy 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. The focus of this release is on performance, but it also contains new and improved major functionality. Highlights include: * Performance Improvements across-the-board * A new sub-package for Uncertainties and Distributions * A new Box Least Squares Periodogram * J-style coordinates parser * Support for use of Time and TimeDelta columns within a Table * Array-valued Time and TimeDelta objects are now mutable * Better uncertainty support and bit planes in NDData * A new operator for Quantity performance * Thermodynamic temperature equivalency * Little-h equivalency * Change in default cosmology * Significant improvements in WCSAxes * A new convenience function for imshow with ImageNormalize * A common API for World Coordinate Systems 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/3.1.html Note that the Astropy 3.x series only supports Python 3. Python 2 users can continue to use the 2.x (LTS) series (but without new features). Instructions for installing Astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at: http://docs.astropy.org If you make use of the Anaconda Python Distribution, you can update to Astropy v3.1 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 300 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 As a reminder, Astropy v2.0 (our long term support release) will continue to be supported with bug fixes (but no new features) until the end of 2019, so if you need to use Astropy in a very stable environment, you may want to consider staying on the v2.0.x set of releases (for which we have recently released v2.0.10). If you use Astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to another package, please remember to acknowledgment it by citing the appropriate Astropy paper. For the most up-to-date suggestions, see the acknowledgement page (http://www.astropy.org/acknowledging.html), but as of this release the recommendation is: This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2018). where (Astropy Collaboration, 2018) is a reference to https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/aabc4f 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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list Support the Python Software Foundation: http://www.python.org/psf/donations/
