The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages. Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in, and many other components are under development. For more details, on the plan for the Astropy project, you can read the original vision, or the documentation overview.
The current stable version is Astropy 0.2.2.
Stay updated by following @astropy on Twitter, and sign up for the astropy mailing list, where you can ask python astronomy questions of all sorts! If you want to get involved in Astropy development efforts, or other more technical discussions of Astropy, join the astropy-dev list.
Google Summer of Code 2013: Astropy is officially a project for the Google Summer of Code 2013, as part of the Python organization - if you are interested in finding out more, or applying to work on Astropy, see our Project ideas page for more details!
The documentation for the astropy core package is available at the websites listed below. The first is for the most recent released version. The second is for a version of the documentation that is automatically updated any time a change is made to the astropy source code repository.
Detailed installation instructions are provided in the documentation, but we have included a simplified version here.
Astropy requires Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3, and Numpy 1.4 or later. The best way to install astropy is to use pip:
pip install astropy
Or alternatively, you can download the source from the current version (Astropy 0.2.2), and install the source code in that archive using:
python setup.py install
You can check that astropy is correctly installed by starting up python or ipython, and importing astropy:
>>> import astropy
If you do not get any errors, the installation was successful!
If you want to discuss issues with other Astropy users, you can sign up to the astropy mailing list. Alternatively, the astropy-dev list is where you should go to discuss more technical aspects of Astropy.
If you have come across something that you believe is a bug, please open a ticket in the Astropy issue tracker, and we will look into it promptly!
If you use Astropy for a publication, please consider adding the following acknowledgment:
This research made use of Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy.
In the near future, we will publish a refereed paper describing Astropy, so the above acknowledgment will be updated to reflect this.