Dear colleagues, We are very happy to announce the v1.1 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: * New functions to automatically determine histogram bins, including the Bayesian blocks algorithm * A new interface to transform between Table objects and pandas DataFrame objects * Support for table indexing * Support for supergalactic and ecliptic coordinates * A new .info attribute to get summary information about tables and columns * A new show_in_notebook() method to show a table in Jupyter/IPython notebooks with additional interactivity features * Support for new units, including logarithmic units such as magnitudes, dex, and decibels * Support for the Planck 2015 cosmology and significant performance improvements in the cosmology sub-package 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/1.1.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 v1.1 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 160 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 As a reminder, Astropy v1.0 (our long term support release) will continue to be supported with bug fixes until Feb 19th 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 rather than upgrading to v1.1. 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! Thomas Robitaille, Erik Tollerud, and Perry Greenfield on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration