ANN: released poliastro 0.2, astrodynamics in Python

[Juan Luis Cano]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce release 0.2.0 of poliastro, a BSD-licensed
Python/Fortran package for studying Orbital Mechanics and Astrodynamics in
Python!

https://pybonacci.github.io/poliastro

If you already have numpy, matplotlib and astropy, you can install it 
with pip:

$ pip install poliastro

This latest version diverges completely from previous 0.1.x series: the
codebase has been refactored to provide an intuitive, Pythonic API to the
user, heavily inspired by Helge Eichhorn's Plyades:

     from poliastro.examples import iss
     from poliastro.plotting import plot

     plot(iss)

poliastro handles physical quantities with units thanks to
astropy.units. Some of its features are:

* Orbit propagation
* Conversion between position and velocity vectors and classical orbital
   elements
* Hohmann and bielliptic maneuvers computation
* Trajectory plotting

And more to come!

poliastro wraps several Fortran subroutines, written by David A. Vallado
for his book "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications" and available
on the Internet as the companion software of the book. The author explicitly
gave permission to redistribute these subroutines in this project under the
current license.

The User Guide explains the basic use of the library and
examples are provided in the form of IPython notebooks. See the
"What's new" document and the GitHub log for a complete list of
changes.

The project is still not mature and the codebase is subject to change.

Contributions, bug reports, suggestions and advice are more than welcome!

Juan Luis Cano