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.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Hubble constant: past, present and future

“…For all the other measurements we use Gaussian likelihoods with the measured means and standard deviations (6x6 covariance matrix for BOSS). We used the Astropy 8 package [6,60] for the theoretical modelling of the BAO peak coordinates. Methods to interpolate the χ 2 tables are now available as part of the popular MCMC packages CosmoMC [45] and MontePython [61].…”

A Comparison of UV and Optical Metallicities in Star-forming Galaxies

“…This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. This research made use of Astropy, 8 a communitydeveloped core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al 2013;Price-Whelan et al 2018). Table 6 includes the coefficients for the third order polynomial used to fit the Cloudy and direct-T e method oxygen abundances.…”

Serendipitous discovery of a brightening quasar at redshift z = 3.68

“…Each date was calibrated with the standard star identified in Column 2 in Table 1. The MUSE pipeline uses the standard Paranal atmospheric extinction curve of Patat et al (2011). Every single exposure was used to produce a pixel table which was later combined with all other pixel tables with the pipeline routine muse_cube_combine after applying suitable offsets determined with the routine muse_exp_align.…”

“…This research made use of Astropy, 5 a communitydeveloped core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al 2013;Price-Whelan et al 2018).…”

“…One of the most powerful techniques to measure the properties of the central black holes is reverberation mapping (RM) which studies the time lag between the continuum and the Broad Line Region (BLR) emission lines brightness variations (see e.g. Blandford & McKee (1982), Kaspi et al (2000), Peterson et al (2004), Lira et al (2018) and references † Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory, Chile, ESO, technical program 60.A-9801(T). therein).…”