Dear colleagues, We are very happy to announce the v5.0 release of astropy, a core Python package for Astronomy: http://www.astropy.org The astropy core package is a community-driven Python package intended to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for astronomy and astrophysics. It is part of the Astropy Project, which aims to foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages for Python. New and improved major functionality in this release includes: * Support for reading, writing, and converting Cosmology objects * A new cosmology units module * New trigonometric and spline models * Support for dask arrays in tables * Support for registering array-like objects as mixin columns * Support for reading and writing tables to Parquet format * Support for reading and writing tables to MRT format * Support for masked quantity columns, including masked FITS columns with units * Converting SkyCoord to QTable * A new unified I/O architecture 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/5.0.html The astropy v5.0.x series now replaces v4.0.x as the long term support release, and will be supported for two years. Instructions for installing astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at: http://docs.astropy.org If you usually use pip/vanilla Python, you can do: pip install astropy --upgrade If you make use of the Anaconda Python Distribution, soon you will be able update to Astropy v5.0 with: conda update astropy Or if you cannot wait for Anaconda to update their default version, you can use the conda-forge channel: conda update -c conda-forge astropy Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues Over 400 people have contributed code to the core astropy package so far, and you can find out more about the team here: https://www.astropy.org/team.html If you use astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to another package, please remember to acknowledge it by citing the appropriate Astropy paper. For the most up-to-date suggestions, see the acknowledgement page, but as of this release the recommendation is: This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2018). We hope that you enjoy using astropy as much as we enjoyed developing it! Thomas Robitaille v5.0 Release Coordinator on behalf of The Astropy Project https://www.astropy.org/announcements/release-5.0.html