The Astropy Project is made possible through the hard work of hundreds of
people in the community. Contributions take many forms, from participating
in online forums, being an Astropy sub-committee member, giving talks,
writing tutorials and documentation, writing code, making releases,
organizing conferences, and much much more.
In this page we specially recognize the people and organizations that
have made significant contributions to the Astropy project. This comes in
the form of lifetime contributors and institutional support that provides both
direct and indirect funding for Astropy.
Here we list individuals who estimate they have spent 2000 hours or more,
equivalent to full time for a year, working on and contributing to the
Astropy Project. These individuals have demonstrated a long-term commitment
to the project in many areas and exemplify the high standards we seek to
achieve.
Adam Ginsburg
Together with others, Adam initiated development of the astroquery and
regions packages, and continued maintaining or contributing to both since.
He developed the fft part of the convolution package and maintained it
since. Adam played small roles in a number of other areas, but particularly
recently in outreach to the radio community by creating tools
(spectral-cube, etc.) that link radio data to astropy.
Adrian Price-Whelan
Adrian is the lead coordinator and developer behind the Learn Astropy and
Astropy tutorials initiatives. He was an initial contributor of the concept
and code for the Quantity class in astropy.units and serves as lead
developer of astropy.coordinates. In the latter role he was a key player in
adding support for velocity data such as proper motions in
astropy.coordinates.
Brigitta Sipőcz
Since coming to the project in
2014, Brigitta has been an active and valued member of the Astropy community
in many key roles. Most notably, she has been the lead developer and maintains
responsibility for critical parts of the Astropy infrastructure which keep
the core package and affiliated packages running smoothly for both testing
and release distribution. She is an astropy core release manager and
the GSoC coordinator for Astropy.
Erik Tollerud
Erik has played a key leadership and technical role in the Astropy project
since it began in 2011. His contributions include writing large parts of the core coordinates and
uncertainties packages, serving in the Coordination Committee since 2011,
serving as a release manager and a number of infrastructure roles, providing
leadership on writing the Astropy papers and proposals, and Finance
committee work.
Kelle Cruz
Kelle has been on the Coordination Committee since 2016 with a focus on
community management, user discussion forums, workshops, and expanding
educational materials. Her role as the Learn Coordinator has been especially
impacting. She has played a crucial lead role in the areas of governance,
fundraising, and grant writing as Astropy has grown into a large and widely
recognized project.
Larry Bradley
Larry has been involved in the project since the fall of 2013.
Since 2014, he has served as the lead developer and maintainer of
the Photutils package, an Astropy coordinated package for source
detection, photometry, and related tools. He is also a developer
and maintainer of the Astropy visualization, stats, and convolution
packages and the Regions coordinated package. Larry has also served
as an instructor at Astropy workshops since 2016.
Madison Bray
Madison was a founding member of the Astropy project and was the main
developer of the io.fits core subpackage which forms the basis of much of
the I/O for astropy. After taking a hiatus from Astropy in 2016 for another
opportunity, Madison rejoined in the role of DevOps and Operations Support
in 2020.
Marten van Kerkwijk
Marten has been actively involved in astropy core development since 2013. He
has made many key contributions, most notably leading the effort to make
Quantities truly useful throughout astropy by working with and contributing to numpy to ensure interaction
with numpy functions became seemless, and optimizing their use inside coordinates. He led
the development of algorithm improvements in the Time class to ensure
accuracy at the level needed for pulsar timing, and he played an important
role in making the Table class versatile.
Matt Craig
Since becoming involved in the project in fall 2013, Matt co-led the
development of ccdproc, the coordinated package for optical/IR image data
reduction and served as lead for the NDData subpackage. He also served
on multiple Python in Astronomy organizing committees, helped with a couple
of coordination meetings, and worked hard to make sure the astropy ecosystem
of packages is available on major platforms to improve accessibility.
Michael Droettboom
Michael was a prolific contributor to Astropy from 2011 through 2015,
contributing over 400 pull requests in many areas of the core, with a focus
on the wcs, votable, and table subpackages. His deep understanding of best
coding practices provided important inspiration for other members of the
initial core development team.
Moritz Günther
Moritz has been involved in the Project since 2011, with contributions to
the io.ascii package and a continuing role as a package maintainer. He has
also contributed to the stats core subpackage and the photutils and saba
packages. Since 2020, Moritz has been serving as an Affiliated Package
review editor and has been an active member of the interim Finance Committee.
Nadia Dencheva
Nadia has been an active member of the project since it started, where she
has been the lead developer and maintainer for the modeling and wcs
packages. She has also been involved with the serialization of astropy
objects to the ASDF format.
Perry Greenfield
More than any other single person, Perry has been responsible for the
adoption of Python in astronomy. He recognized the promise of Python as a
language for astronomical data analysis and processing far before the rest
of the community and was responsible for an institutional commitment of
substantial resources in this direction. Perry was a key player in the
initial formation of the Astropy project and served as a Coordination
Committee member from 2011 to 2016. In 2020, Perry took on the role of
Ombudsperson.
Pey Lian Lim
Pey Lian has been an important team member since 2012, providing key
infrastructure and operational support focused on the core package. In her
maintainer roles for testing and documentation infrastructure and DevOps and
Operations Support, she keeps Astropy running. Special commendation is due
for leading the extremely rapid and unexpected migration from Travis CI to
GitHub Actions in 2020. Pey Lian's tireless attention in triaging core
issues is well-recognized.
Simon Conseil
After a first pull request in 2012, Simon became a regular contributor to
Astropy around 2015. Since 2017 he has been the main maintainer of io.fits,
taking on the daunting role of managing this complex and critical
subpackage. He also contributes other parts of Astropy including
infrastructure, modeling, io.ascii, stats, table, and visualization.
Tom Aldcroft
In 2011, Tom was part of an initial core group that recognized the need for
a common Astropy package for the community, and he helped organize the first
official Astropy coordination meeting. Since that time he has been an active
contributor to the project, taking a lead role in the development and
maintenance of three core subpackages: table, time, and io.ascii. In 2016 he
was appointed as one of the Astropy Project Coordination Committee members.
Tom Robitaille
Tom has been a recognized leader in the Astropy project since it began,
being part of the core group that started the project and organized the
first Astropy coordination meeting. His individual contributions are too
numerous to name, but they include contributing large parts of the core
package covering many areas, developing the astropy-healpix and regions
coordinated packages, serving as a release manager, GSoC coordinator, and
member of the Coordination Committee.
Here we recognize the institutions who have made major contributions to the
Astropy project by either direct funding to the project or by indirect funding
of employees who have contributed.
Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
STScI has played a foundational role in the development and advancement of the
Astropy Project since its inception. STScI has provided continued and
substantial support to the project via staff contributions since 2011, including
six lifetime contributors to astropy. Additionally, STScI has provided on-going
support and leadership to both Astropy and the broader scientific Python
computing ecosystem.
Moore Foundation
In late 2019 the Astropy project was awarded a major grant from the Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation. This grant was targeted at supporting Astropy’s
transition to a fully sustainable project, where success no longer hinges on a
limited set of contributors. This grant was transformative for the Project.
NASA
NASA has awarded funding for the Astropy Project through the
"ROSES E.7 (Support for Open Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries)" program (2021)
and the Open-Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries" foundation award (2024).
This funding is used to support ongoing infrastructure work, help
with maintaining the core package, and to support the ecosystem of affiliated packages.
This grant helps to ensure that Astropy remains a sustainable project.
Chandra X-ray Center (CXC)
The CXC has supported multiple staff members to work on the Astropy project,
equivalent to more than 5 person-years since the start of the project.
NumFOCUS
We wish to express gratitude to the NumFocus Organization for providing the
organizational support to grow Astropy into the role of a community-leading
project with a substantial budget.
Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), Flatiron Institute, Simons
Foundation
The CCA has provided logistical and travel support for the Python in Astronomy
conference, the coordination meeting, and the spectroscopy working
group.
Dunlap
Dunlap has provided Financial support/seed funding for the Astropy Learn project since 2020.
Europlanet Society
The Europlanet society has awarded funding for the Astropy Project through the Europlanet 2024 RI,
European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No 871149.
This funding is used in particular to support the ongoing work on planetary reference frames and
world coordinate system.