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Published September 2018 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The Astropy Project: Building an Open-science Project and Status of the v2.0 Core Package

Abstract

The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package, as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy Project.

Additional Information

© 2018 The American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2018 January 8; revised 2018 March 27; accepted 2018 March 29; published 2018 August 24. We thank the referee for an insightful report that improved the paper. We would like to thank the members of the community who have contributed to Astropy, who have opened issues and provided feedback, and who have supported the project in a number of different ways. We would like to acknowledge Alex Conley and Neil Crighton for maintaining the astropy.cosmology subpackage. The Astropy community is supported by and makes use of a number of organizations and services outside the traditional academic community. We thank Google for financing and organizing the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program, that has funded several students per year to work on Astropy related projects over the summer. These students often turn into long-term contributors. We also thank NumFOCUS and the Python Software Foundation for financial support. Within the academic community, we thank institutions that make it possible for astronomers and other developers on their staff to contribute their time to the development of Astropy projects. We acknowledge the support of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the South African Astronomical Observatory. The following individuals would like to recognize support for their personal contributions. H.M.G. was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory contract SV3-73016 to MIT for Support of the Chandra X-Ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060. J.T.V. was supported by the UW eScience Institute via grants from the Moore Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Washington Research Foundation. S.M.C. acknowledges the National Research Foundation of South Africa. M.V.B. was supported by NASA's Planetary Astronomy Program. T.L.A. was supported by NASA contract NAS8-03060. Support for E.J.T. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant No. 51316.01 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555, as well as a Giacconi Fellowship. M.B. was supported by the FONDECYT regular project 1170618 and the MINEDUC-UA projects codes ANT 1655 and ANT 1656. D.H. was supported through the SFB 881 "The Milky Way System" by the German Research Foundation (DFG). W.E.K was supported by an ESO Fellowship. C.M. is supported by NSF grant AST-1313484. S.P. was supported by grant AYA2016-75808-R (FEDER) issued by the Spanish government. J.E.H.T. was supported by the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., on behalf of the international Gemini partnership of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and the United States of America. Y.P.B was supported by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, under the R&D program supervised by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. Furthermore, the astropy packages would not exist in their current form without a number of web services for code hosting, continuous integration, and documentation; in particular, astropy heavily relies on GitHub, Travis CI, Appveyor, CircleCI, and Read the Docs. Astropy interfaces with the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. It also makes use of the ERFA library (Tollerud et al. 2017), which in turn derives from the IAU SOFA Collection127 developed by the International Astronomical Union Standards of Fundamental Astronomy (Hohenkerk 2011). Software: astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), numpy (Van der Walt et al. 2011), scipy (Jones et al. 2001), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), Cython (Behnel et al. 2011), SOFA (Hohenkerk 2011), ERFA (Tollerud et al. 2017).

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Submitted - 1801.02634.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 18, 2023