[AstroPy] ANN: Astropy v1.2 released

Thomas Robitaille thomas.robitaille at gmail.com
Thu Jun 23 08:32:55 EDT 2016


Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v1.2 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:

* A new class to compute Lomb-Scargle periodograms efficiently using
different methods.
* A number of new statistics functions including those for Jackknife
resampling, circular statistics, and the Akaike and Bayesian
information criteria.
* Support for getting the positions of solar system bodies in the
coordinates sub-package.
* The ability to compute Barycentric and Heliocentric light-travel
time corrections.
* Support for offset coordinate frames, which can be used to define a
coordinate system relative to a known position and rotation.
* An implementation of the zscale algorithm to determine image limits
automatically.
* Support for bolometric magnitudes in the units package.
* Improvements to the NDData class and subclasses.
* Auto-downloading of IERS tables as needed, which gives information
about Earth orientation parameters necessary for high precision
coordinate calculations and conversions to/from the UT1 scale.

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/1.2.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 v1.2 with:

  conda update astropy

If you normally use pip, you can upgrade with:

  pip install astropy --upgrade

Note that if you install now you should get Astropy v1.2.1, as some
last-minute bug fixes were found and fixed after the v1.2 release was
created but before this announcement.

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

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

Over 190 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 (for which we have
recently released v1.0.10).

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!

Erik Tollerud, Tom Robitaille, Kelle Cruz, and Tom Aldcroft
on behalf of The Astropy Collaboration



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