Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy

TL;DR

Astropy is an open-source Python package that provides essential tools for astronomy data analysis, supporting file formats, coordinate transformations, and cosmological calculations, with ongoing development of advanced features.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first public release of Astropy, a comprehensive community-developed Python package for core astronomy data analysis functionalities.

Findings

Supports FITS, VO tables, ASCII formats

Includes unit conversions and physical constants

Provides celestial coordinate and time transformations

Abstract

We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the community, including support for domain-specific file formats such as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions. Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function (PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.