[AstroPy] ANN: Astropy v2.0 released

[Erik Tollerud]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v2.0 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:

* Most models now support parameters having units (i.e., being
Quantity objects).
* A new CCDData class that is directly useful for typical astronomical
images and implements the NDData interface.
* Coordinate frame objects can now carry proper motions and radial
velocities, and will carry them through and transform them between
frames. (This functionality is experimental and feedback is greatly
desired.)
* Many of the typical mixin columns for astropy tables can now be
saved into ECSV files and fully round-tripped.
* The fft and direct versions of the convolution algorithm in
astropy.convolution are now more consistent and work better with
typical use cases.
* A variety of additions to the astropy.stats subpackage

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/2.0.html

Note that the Astropy 2.x series will be the last versions of Astropy
that will support Python 2.x. Future versions of Astropy will only
support Python 3.x.

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 v2.0 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 232 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

Astropy v2.0 now repaces v1.0 as the long term support release, and
will be supported until the end of 2019. The next major release of
Astropy (scheduled for January 2018) will only support Python 3.x. So
if you need to use Astropy in a very stable environment in Python 2.7,
you should continue to use the 2.0.x series after 3.0.x is released.

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! The announcement can also be
found online at http://www.astropy.org/announcements/release-2.0.html.


Special thanks to the coordinator for this release: Brigitta Sipocz.

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