Affiliated Packages
A major part of the Astropy project is the concept of “Affiliated Packages”. An affiliated package is an astronomy-related Python package that is not part of the astropy core package, but has requested to be included as part of the Astropy project’s community. These packages are expressing an interest in Astropy’s goals of improving reuse, interoperability, and interface standards for python astronomy and astrophysics packages.
If you are developer interested in signing up as an affiliated package, details are at the end of this page.
Featured packages
Montage-wrapper
About: Montage-wrapper is a pure Python module that provides a Python API to the Montage Astronomical Image Mosaic Engine, including both functions to access individual Montage commands, and high-level functions to facilitate mosaicking and re-projecting. Python-montage uses the Astropy core package for reading and writing FITS files.
Developer: Thomas Robitaille
Ginga
About: Ginga is a viewer for astronomical data FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files. The Ginga viewer centers around a new FITS display widget which supports zooming and panning, color and intensity mapping, a choice of several automatic cut levels algorithms and canvases for plotting scalable geometric forms.
Developer: Eric Jeschkee
APLpy
About: APLpy (the Astronomical Plotting Library in Python) is a Python module aimed at producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data in FITS format. The module uses Matplotlib, a powerful and interactive plotting package. It is capable of creating output files in several graphical formats, including EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG.
Developers: Thomas Robitaille, Eli Bressert, Adam Ginsburg
Installing Affiliated Packages
The simplest way to install and keep up-to-date most affiliated packages is to use the Anaconda python distribution. This distribution provides Astropy built-in, and affiliated packages are available from a "channel" maintained by the Astropy community. You can see the affiliated packages in the channel here, and if you have anaconda installed, you can do conda search -c astropy some_affiliated_package. Most importantly, you can then install them with conda install -c astropy some_affiliated_package.
If you do not have Anaconda or wish to install from source, for most affiliated packages, downloading the source code and doing python setup.py install will work. Many also support the Astropy core package's additional build and install options, as they use the affiliated package template (detailed more below). That said, affiliated packages are developed independently of the Astropy core library. This means they are free to develop their packages as they see fit, and can have a variety of different requirements or unusual install procedures. Hence you should refer to the package's documentation first if you encounter problems.
Affiliated Packages Registry
The following tables list all currently registered affiliated packages. They are determined from the json file, which is the actual authoritative registry. The Stable column indicates whether the package maintainer consider the package to be ready for use. Packages that are under heavy development and for which the user interface is likely to change significantly in the near future are marked as No.
Affiliated Packages
| Package Name | Stable | PyPI Name | Web Page | Code Repository | Maintainer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading... | ||||||
While the above table lists all the full affiliated package,the below table indicates packages that have been provisionally accepted as affiliated packages, but may be removed from the registry in the future if they don't make sufficient progress towards meeting Astropy standards (See below for more details).
Provisionally accepted Affiliated packages
| Package Name | Stable | PyPI Name | Web Page | Code Repository | Maintainer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Other astronomy packages
This section lists some packages that are not affiliated pacakges, but are useful reference (i.e. precursors, overlapping in functionality, etc).
- astropysics: A library of assorted optical astronomy and astrophysics tools. A "precursor" of sorts, in the process of getting ported to Astropy.
- kapteyn: A library primarily concerned with celestial coordinates and other transformations. Provided some of the inspiration for astropy's coordinates package.
Becoming an Affiliated Package
If you are a developer of an astronomy package and would like your package to become affiliated with the Astropy project, leave a message on the astropy-dev group requesting affiliated package status. If you are comfortable doing so, you should also create a pull request adding your package to the registry file on the github repository for this web site. The Astropy coordination commitee and community will then consider your package based on the standards below.
- It should use classes and functions from the astropy package wherever possible and appropriate. This facilitates re-use of code and sharing of resources.
- The package should have documentation that adequately explains the use of the package, at standards comparable to astropy. Additionally, user-facing classes and functions should all have docstrings. We suggest using sphinx, with the numpydoc-like docstring standards used by astropy, but this is not a strict requirement as long as the documentation is of comparable quality.
- The package should make a best-effort to include an easy-to-run test suite that covers its intended functionality. We realize this is not always possible, but when it is, a test suite is a crucial element of stable software and reproducible science.
- The package developer(s) should make an effort to connect with the Astropy developer community, including developers from the core astropy package or any related affiliated packages.
- While not a strict requirement, we also provide coding guidelines that will make your code easier to read by members of the community.
- We strongly encourage affiliated packages be compatible with Python 3.x. Tips for how to acheive this are given in the revelant section of the coding guidelines. The recommended route is to use six, which can be imported as "
from astropy.extern import six" to avoid introducing an explicit dependency on six.
If your package is judged by the coordination committe to meet these standards, it will be added to the affiliated package registry. If the package is not quite at these standards, but working towards them, the package will be given "provisional" status. Provisional packages will be re-evaluated yearly by the coordinating committee, or earlier if the package author requests a review. (You can e-mail a member of the coordination committee or coordinators@astropy.org to request such a review). In this re-evaluation, the committee will look at progress the package has made over the previous year. If it has been advanced sufficiently to meet the standards above, it will be considered a full affiliated package (no longer provisional). If it has made some progress but is not yet up to the standards, provisional status will be renewed for a year. If no progress seems to be being made, the committee will contact the authors and determine what their plans are to improve the situation. Based on that, the committee may decide to renew the provisional status, or remove the package from the registry.
Affiliated Package Template
If you are considering creating a new astronomy package and would like it to be an Astropy affiliated package, we provide a package template to make it much easier to meet these standards. It provides the necessary structure to generate documentation like that used in the astropy package, a ready-to-use testing framework, and a variety of tools that streamline tasks like user configuration, caching downloaded files, or linking C-compiled extensions. More details on this template are available in the usage instructions for the template.
We recommend that you join the astropy-affiliated-maintainers mailing list to be kept informed of updates to the package template, as well as to have any dicussions related to setting up affiliated packages.