[AstroPy] Astropy Google Summer of Code students announced!

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

I am very happy to announce that two students will be joining the
Astropy project this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code
program!

The selected students are:

- Madhura Parikh, who will be working on the Astroquery affiliated
package. Astroquery aims to provide a Python interface to many web
services such as IRSA, SIMBAD, VizieR, and many others. Madhura will
be refactoring it to unify the API, with the aim of a first stable
release at the end of the summer.

- Axel Donath, who will be working on significantly extending the
capabilities of the Photutils affiliated package. Photutils aims to
provide Python tools to perform aperture and PSF photometry, and the
long-term goal is to integrate it into the core Astropy package. Axel
will focus on developing the source detection and PSF-fitting
functionality which are currently missing.

Competition for GSoC was tough this year, and there were a number of
excellent applications to work with Astropy, so I want to thank all
the students who applied to work with us!

The official GSoC mentors for Astropy are Tom Aldcroft, Adam Ginsburg,
Wolfgang Kerzendorf, Adrian Price-Whelan, Erik Tollerud, and myself.
Throughout the summer, Madhura and Axel will be communicating with the
Astropy development team through the astropy-dev list, so if you are
interested in either of the projects mentioned above, please feel free
to get involved in the discussions!

Cheers,
Tom