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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list Support the Python Software Foundation: http://www.python.org/psf/donations/
