What’s New in Astropy 6.0?

Overview

Astropy 6.0 is a major release that adds significant new functionality since the 5.3 release.

In particular, this release includes:

In addition to these major changes, Astropy v6.0 includes a large number of smaller improvements and bug fixes, which are described in the Full Changelog. By the numbers:

  • X issues have been closed since v5.3

  • X pull requests have been merged since v5.3

  • X distinct people have contributed code

Define Geodetic Representations via their geometric parameters

The user may now define custom spheroidal models for the Earth or other planetary bodies by subclassing BaseGeodeticRepresentation and defining _equatorial_radius and _flattening attributes:

>>> from astropy.coordinates import BaseGeodeticRepresentation, WGS84GeodeticRepresentation
>>> from astropy import units as u
>>> class IAU1976EarthGeodeticRepresentation(BaseGeodeticRepresentation):
...     _equatorial_radius = 6378140 * u.m
...     _flattening = 0.3352805 * u.percent
>>> representation = IAU1976EarthGeodeticRepresentation(lon=45.8366*u.deg,
...     lat=56.1499*u.deg, height=367*u.m)
>>> representation.to_cartesian() 
<CartesianRepresentation (x, y, z) in m
    (2481112.60371134, 2554647.09482601, 5274064.55958489)>
>>> representation.represent_as(WGS84GeodeticRepresentation) 
<WGS84GeodeticRepresentation (lon, lat, height) in (rad, rad, m)
    (0.79999959, 0.98000063, 370.01796023)>

See Creating Your Own Geodetic Representation for more details.

Updates to cosmology

The Cosmology class in cosmology now supports the latex format in its write() method, allowing users to export a cosmology object to a LaTeX table.:

>>> from astropy.cosmology import Planck18
>>> Planck18.write("example_cosmology.tex", format="latex")

This will write the cosmology object to a file in LaTeX format, with appropriate formatting of units and table alignment.

Full change log

To see a detailed list of all changes in version v6.0, including changes in API, please see the Full Changelog.