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

TLDR

The Astropy Project promotes open‑source Python packages that supply essential astronomical tools, with its core package astropy serving as the foundation for specialized extensions. This article overviews the Astropy project's organization, summarizes core package features in version 2.0, and outlines future planned enhancements. The project infrastructure is designed to facilitate and support development of a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages.

Abstract

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.