[AstroPy] ANN: Astropy 0.2 released

[Erik Tollerud]

Dear colleagues,


We are very happy to announce the first public release (v0.2) of the
Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy:


   http://www.astropy.org


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.


Key functionality in this first release includes:


* Manipulation of scalar and array quantities with physical units
* Pre-defined physical and astronomical constants
* Celestial coordinate representation and transformations
* Reading/writing/editing of FITS files, VO tables, and many ASCII table formats
* Class for grid-based data with meta-data and units
* Powerful table creation/manipulation
* Common cosmological calculations
* World Coordinate System (WCS) transformations
* Representation/transformation of Times and Dates to very high accuracy


Additional major functionality is planned for the near future,
including but not limited to model fitting, photometric analysis
tools, and Virtual Observatory (VO) querying.


Some of the functionality in Astropy was adapted from previously
existing packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, asciitable, and vo.table.
Hence, Astropy works as a replacement for these separate packages.


Instructions for installing Astropy are provided at the
http://www.astropy.org website, and extensive documentation can be
found at:


   http://docs.astropy.org


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


   https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues


Over 30 developers have contributed code for this release of Astropy,
and you can find out more about the team behind Astropy here:


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


Please feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think
might be interested in this release.


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


Erik Tollerud, Thomas Robitaille, and Perry Greenfield
on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration