About The Astropy Project¶

The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a core package for astronomy using the Python programming language and improve usability, interoperability, and collaboration between astronomy Python packages. The core astropy package contains functionality aimed at professional astronomers and astrophysicists, but may be useful to anyone developing astronomy software. The Astropy Project also includes "affiliated packages," Python packages that are not necessarily developed by the core development team, but share the goals of Astropy, and often build from the core package's code and infrastructure.

Aside from the actual code, Astropy is also a community of astronomy- associated users and developers that agree that sharing utilities is healthy for the community and the science it produces. This community is of course central to accomplishing anything with the code itself. We welcome anyone who wishes to contribute to the project and expect everyone in our community to follow the code of conduct when interacting with others.

For more details on background of the project, you can read the original vision from when the project was founded.

astropy Core Package¶

The astropy package (alternatively known as the "core" package) contains various classes, utilities, and a packaging framework intended to provide commonly-used astronomy tools. It is divided into a variety of sub-packages, which are described in detail in the documentation.

Affiliated Packages¶

The Astropy project includes the concept of "affiliated packages." An affiliated package is an astronomy-related python package that is not part of the astropy core source code, but has requested to be included in the general community effort of the Astropy project. Such a package may be a candidate for eventual inclusion in the main astropy package (although this is not required). Until then, however, it is a separate package, and may not be in the astropy namespace.

The authoritative listing of current affiliated packages is available at http://affiliated.astropy.org. That page also describes the process to get a package listed as an affiliated package.

License¶

Astropy is licensed under a three-clause BSD license. For details, see the LICENSE.rst file in the astropy repository.

Governance¶

Astropy governance is as laid out in APE 0, consisting of the Coordination Committee, the Ombudsperson, and the Voting Members. Accompanying policies are documented in the project policies folder.

Fiscal Sponsor¶

Astropy is a Sponsored Project of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity in the United States. NumFOCUS provides Astropy with fiscal, legal, and administrative support to help ensure the health and sustainability of the project. Visit numfocus.org for more information.