The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package

TL;DR

The paper discusses the organization, key features, and future plans of the Astropy project, an open-source Python library supporting astronomical data analysis and fostering an inclusive, collaborative scientific community.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the Astropy project's structure, recent core package updates, and infrastructure for developing an ecosystem of interoperable astronomical software.

Findings

Major release 2.0 with new features

Enhanced infrastructure for package interoperability

Future development directions outlined

Abstract

The Astropy project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly-needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy project is the core package Astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of inter-operable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy project.