Astropy: A community Python package for astronomy

Thomas P. Robitaille (1) , Erik J. Tollerud , Perry Greenfield , Michael Droettboom , Erik Bray , Tom Aldcroft , Matt Davis , Adam Ginsburg , Adrian M. Price-Whelan , Wolfgang E. Kerzendorf , Alexander Conley , Neil Crighton (1) , Kyle Barbary , Demitri Muna , Henry Ferguson , Frédéric Grollier , Madhura M. Parikh , Prasanth H. Nair , Hans M. Günther , Christoph Deil , Julien Woillez , Simon Conseil , Roban Kramer , James E. H. Turner , Leo Singer , Ryan Fox , Benjamin A. Weaver , Victor Zabalza , Zachary I. Edwards , K. Azalee Bostroem , D. J. Burke , Andrew R. Casey , Steven M. Crawford , Nadia Dencheva , Justin Ely , Tim Jenness , Kathleen Labrie , Pey Lian Lim , Francesco Pierfederici , Andrew Pontzen , Andy Ptak , Brian Refsdal , Mathieu Servillat (2) , Ole Streicher

1 MPIA - Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie
2 AIM (UMR7158 / UMR_E_9005 / UM_112) - Astrophysique Interprétation Modélisation

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 activedevelopment, 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.

Keywords: virtual observatory tools; methods: data analysis; methods: miscellaneous

Domains: Astrophysics [astro-ph]

Thomas P. Robitaille, Erik J. Tollerud, Perry Greenfield, Michael Droettboom, Erik Bray, et al.. Astropy: A community Python package for astronomy. Astronomy and Astrophysics - A&A, 2013, 558, pp.A33. ⟨10.1051/0004-6361/201322068⟩. ⟨cea-01135442⟩