Dear colleagues, We are very happy to announce the fourth major public release (v1.0) 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: * Support for Altitude/Azimuth and Galactocentric coordinates in astropy.coordinates * A new astropy.visualization sub-package * A new astropy.analytic_functions sub-package * Compound models in astropy.modeling may now be created using arithmetic expressions, and the resulting models support fitting. * Significantly faster C-based readers/writers for astropy.io.ascii * Support for a new enhanced CSV ASCII table format * A refactored Table class with improved performance when adding/removing columns * Support for using Time, Quantity, or SkyCoord arrays as Table columns 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/1.0.html Astropy v1.0 is a special release that we are denoting a Long Term Support (LTS) release, which means that we will be supporting it with bug fixes for the next two years, rather than the usual six months. More information about this can be found at the link above. Instructions for installing Astropy are provided on our website, and extensive documentation can be found at: http://docs.astropy.org In particular, if you use the Anaconda Python Distribution, you can update to v1.0 with: conda update astropy Whereas if you usually use pip, you can do: pip install astropy --upgrade Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues Over 122 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 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. We hope that you enjoy using Astropy as much as we enjoyed developing it! Thomas Robitaille, Erik Tollerud, and Perry Greenfield on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration