What’s New in Astropy 8.1?#
Overview#
Astropy 8.1 is a release that adds significant new functionality since the 8.0 release.
In particular, this release includes:
In addition to these major changes, Astropy v8.1 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 v8.0
X pull requests have been merged since v8.0
X distinct people have contributed code
Full change log#
To see a detailed list of all changes in version v8.1, including changes in API, please see the Full Changelog.
Faster Time string formats#
Converting a Time to one of the string-based formats
(iso, isot, yday, fits or datetime64) is now done with
array operations instead of a Python loop over the individual times. For large
arrays this is more than ten times faster, which speeds up printing a Time
and writing tables that contain a time column.
Faster Table joins#
The astropy.table.join() function now has the ability to use pandas.merge as the internal
engine for join operations. This can speed up the join by up to ~10x for large tables
relative to astropy 8.0. This is supported with a new engine option that can have
the values "astropy", "pandas", and "auto". The "auto" mode uses pandas
if it is available and otherwise falls back to the built-in astropy join implementation.
In addition, the built-in astropy join was sped up by a factor of ~2x for the common case of a single join column.