Astropy Core Package Documentation

Welcome to the Astropy documentation! Astropy is a community-driven package intended to contain much of the core functionality and some common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python.

Getting help

If you want to get help or discuss issues with other Astropy users, you can sign up for the astropy mailing list. Alternatively, the astropy-dev mailing list is where you should go to discuss more technical aspects of Astropy with the developers. You can also email the astropy developers privately at astropy-feedback@googlegroups.com...but remember that questions you ask publicly serve as resources for other users!

Reporting Issues

If you have found a bug in Astropy please report it. The preferred way is to create a new issue on the Astropy GitHub issue page; that requires creating a free account on GitHub if you do not have one.

If you prefer not to create a GitHub account, please report the issue to either the astropy mailing list, the astropy-dev mailing list or sending a private email to the astropy core developers at astropy-feedback@googlegroups.com.

Please include an example that demonstrates the issue that will allow the developers to reproduce and fix the problem. You may be asked to also provide information about your operating system and a full Python stack trace; the Astropy developers will walk you through obtaining a stack trace if it is necessary.

For astropy-helpers

As of Astropy v0.4, Astropy and many affiliated packages use a package of utilities called astropy-helpers during building and installation. If you have any build/installation issue–particularly if you’re getting a traceback mentioning the astropy_helpers or ah_bootstrap modules–please send a report to the astropy-helpers issue tracker. If you’re not sure, however, it’s fine to report via the main Astropy issue tracker or one of the other avenues described above.

Contributing

The Astropy project is made both by and for its users, so we highly encourage contributions at all levels. This spans the gamut from sending an email mentioning a typo in the documentation or requesting a new feature all the way to developing a major new package.

The full range of ways to be part of the Astropy project are described at Contribute to Astropy. To get started contributing code or documentation (no git or GitHub experience necessary):

Developer Documentation

The developer documentation contains instructions for how to contribute to Astropy or affiliated packages, 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.

There are additional tools of use for developers in the astropy/astropy-tools repository.

Indices and Tables