[AstroPy] ANN: Astropy v0.4 released

[Erik Tollerud]

Hello,

We are very happy to announce the third major public release (v0.4) of
the astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy:

   http://www.astropy.org


Astropy is a community-driven package intended to contain much of the
core functionality and common tools needed for performing astronomy
and astrophysics with Python.

New and improved major functionality in this release includes:

* A new astropy.vo.samp sub-package adapted from the previously
standalone SAMPy package
* A re-designed astropy.coordinates sub-package for celestial coordinates
* A new ‘fitsheader’ command-line tool that can be used to quickly
inspect FITS headers
* A new HTML table reader/writer
* Improved performance for Quantity objects
* A re-designed configuration framework

In addition, hundreds of smaller improvements and fixes have been
made. An overview of the changes is provided at:

   http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/whatsnew/0.4.html


Instructions for installing Astropy are provided at the
http://www.astropy.org website, and extensive documentation can be
found at:

   http://docs.astropy.org

In particular, if you use Anaconda, you can update to v0.4 with:

   conda update astropy


Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository:

   https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues


Over 80 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 - or as a dependency to another package -
for your work, 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 the Astropy paper which was
published last year:

 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013A%26A...558A..33A


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