Dear colleagues, We are very happy to announce the v1.3 release of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy: http://www.astropy.org Astropy is a community-driven Python package intended to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for astronomy and astrophysics. New and improved major functionality in this release includes: * The WCSAxes framework for plotting points or images on celestial coordinates in matplotlib. * A new function in astropy.visualization to generate 3-color images from astronomy images in different bands. * Astropy coordinate representations now combine like vectors, with useful mathematical operations that can be performed on them. * Astropy coordinates and time objects now behave much more consistently like arrays when they are reshaped. * Earth locations can now be created from a postal address. * JPL Ephemerides can now be used in the coordinates sub-package to improve the accuracy of coordinate transformations and barycentric time corrections. * FORTRAN-style extended floating precision files like 1.495D+238 can now be read using astropy.io.ascii or Table.read. * Astropy objects can now be serialized to (or re-loaded from) a standard YAML representation. * FITS HDUs can now be lazy loaded, improving performance in files with many HDUs. * The default cosmology is now Planck 2015. In addition, hundreds of smaller improvements and fixes have been made. An overview of the changes is provided at: http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/1.3.html Instructions for installing Astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at: http://docs.astropy.org If you make use of the Anaconda Python Distribution, you can update to Astropy v1.3 with: conda update astropy If you normally use pip, you can upgrade with: pip install astropy --upgrade Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues Over 210 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 Astropy v1.0 (our long term support release) will continue to be supported with bug fixes until the v2.0 release in June 2017, so if you need to use Astropy in a very stable environment, you may want to consider staying on the v1.0.x set of releases (for which we are simultaneously releasing v1.0.11). While we typically do not support non-LTS releases, we are also simultaneously releasing an Astropy v1.2.2, the last in that series. This update is primarily to include a leap second at the end of 2016 (but also contains other bug fixes). If you use Astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to another package, please remember to include the following acknowledgment at the end of papers: “This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2013).” where (Astropy Collaboration, 2013) is a reference to the Astropy paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201322068 Please feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested in this release! The announcement can also be found online at http://www.astropy.org/announcements/release-1.3.html. Erik Tollerud, Tom Robitaille, Kelle Cruz, and Tom Aldcroft on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration