Astropy Documentation

The astropy package contains key functionality and common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python. It is at the core of the Astropy Project, which aims to enable the community to develop a robust ecosystem of affiliated packages covering a broad range of needs for astronomical research, data processing, and data analysis.

Important

If you use Astropy for work presented in a publication or talk please help the project via proper citation or acknowledgement. This also applies to use of software or affiliated packages that depend on the astropy core package.

Getting Started

• Installation
• What’s New in Astropy 5.3?
• Importing astropy and Sub-packages
• Getting Started with Sub-packages
• Example Gallery
• Tutorials
• Get Help
• Contribute and Report Problems
• About the Astropy Project

User Documentation

Data structures and transformations

• Constants (astropy.constants)
• Units and Quantities (astropy.units)
• N-Dimensional Datasets (astropy.nddata)
• Data Tables (astropy.table)
• Time and Dates (astropy.time)
• Time Series (astropy.timeseries)
• Astronomical Coordinate Systems (astropy.coordinates)
• World Coordinate System (astropy.wcs)
• Models and Fitting (astropy.modeling)
• Uncertainties and Distributions (astropy.uncertainty)

Files, I/O, and Communication

• Unified File Read/Write Interface
• FITS File Handling (astropy.io.fits)
• ASCII Tables (astropy.io.ascii)
• VOTable XML Handling (astropy.io.votable)
• Miscellaneous: HDF5, YAML, ASDF, Parquet, pickle (astropy.io.misc)
• SAMP (Simple Application Messaging Protocol) (astropy.samp)

Computations and utilities

• Cosmological Calculations (astropy.cosmology)
• Convolution and Filtering (astropy.convolution)
• IERS data access (astropy.utils.iers)
• Data Visualization (astropy.visualization)
• Astrostatistics Tools (astropy.stats)

Nuts and bolts

• Configuration System (astropy.config)
• I/O Registry (astropy.io.registry)
• Logging system
• Python warnings system
• Astropy Core Package Utilities (astropy.utils)
• Astropy Glossary
• Optional Packages’ Glossary

Developer Documentation

The developer documentation contains instructions for how to contribute to Astropy or affiliated packages, install and test the development version, as well as coding, documentation, and testing guidelines.

For the guiding vision of this process and the project as a whole, see Vision for a Common Astronomy Python Package.

• How to make a code contribution
• Python virtual environments
• Try the development version
• When to rebase and squash commits
• Coding Guidelines
• Writing Documentation
• Astropy Narrative Style Guide: A Writing Resource for Contributors
• Testing Guidelines
• Astropy Testing Tools
• Writing Command-Line Scripts
• Building Astropy and its Subpackages
• C or Cython Extensions
• Release procedure for the astropy core package
• Workflow for Maintainers
• How to create and maintain a Python package using the Astropy template
• Full Changelog

There are some additional tools, mostly of use for maintainers, in the astropy/astropy-tools repository.

Project details

• Major Release History
• LTS Backport Policy
• Known Issues
• Authors and Credits
• Licenses

Index

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page