Python package essentially with astronomy related functionality

Main Point:

Researchers have presented the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy, that is able to provide core astronomy-related functionality to the community.

Published in:

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Study Further:

Python:

Python is a portable, interpreted, object-oriented programming language developed and freely distributed by its developer. Python runs on many platforms, including UNIX, Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh and is used for writing TCP/IP applications.

Python is one of the largest growing languages in the astronomy community in the last decade.

Astropy project:

The Astropy project was started in 2011 with the desire to bring the astronomy related developers together to make progress in the development of Python tools for astronomers.

Present Research:

Researchers have presented the first public release of the Astropy package (v0.2) i.e., a Python package for astronomers. Researchers have described the main functionality of the package in the present research.

This main functionality includes “the support for domain-specific file formats such as flexible image transport system (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions.”

To study the further details of presentation or to check the package, you can see the reference.

Reference:

Astropy – A community Python Library for Astronomy (http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/)

The Astropy Collaboration, & Thomas P. Robitaille et al. (2013). Astropy: A community Python package for astronomy Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201322068