[AstroPy] ANN: Astropy v0.3 released

[Erik Tollerud]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the second major public release (v0.3)
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.


New and improved functionality in this release includes:

* A new modeling package which provides a framework for fitting models to data
* Quantity has been re-implemented as a numpy array subclass,
enhancing performance and usability
* Unit conversion and Quantities are better integrated with other
parts of Astropy, simplifying many APIs and user code.
* New Table functionality for joining and aggregating tables
* Support for arrays of celestial coordinates
* A new virtual observatory cone search package
* A dedicated convolution sub-package with many predefined kernels

A full list of improvements, including examples, is provided at:

   http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/whatsnew/0.3.html


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 50 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


If you use Astropy directly - or as a dependency to another package -
for your work, please remember to include the following acknowledgment
at the end of paperst:

"This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python
package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2013)."

where “(Astropy Collaboration, 2013)” is the Astropy paper which was
published this year:

 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013A%26A...558A..33A


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