[AstroPy] Importing packages across distributions?

[Eric L. N. Jensen]

Hi all,

First, thanks for your answers to my previous question about an easy-to-install python distribution - I ended up installing anaconda. 

My next question is most likely a pretty elementary bit of python, but I haven't succeeded in finding a discussion of it: to what extent are packages installed under one distribution's tree importable by another distribution?  I had thought/hoped that after installing anaconda (with its rich collection of auxiliary packages) that I might be able to do the following within CASA (with has its own python installation):

   sys.path.append('/Users/ejensen1/anaconda')

   from astropy import coordinates as coord

but that fails with "No module named astropy".    The situation is similar if I can start up the Mac OS system-distributed python, so it's not just a CASA thing. 

So my specific question is whether this sort of thing is ever possible (simply importing a module from somewhere else in a directory tree), and more generally where to find some documentation / discussion of this issue - all the discussions I've found so far (probably not searching on the right words) imply that importing modules is simply a matter of setting the path correctly, but it's clearly more complicated than that.

Thanks,

Eric