Göttingen 2025 – scientific programme

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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 10: Poster Session

EP 10.2: Poster

Thursday, April 3, 2025, 11:00–12:30, ZHG Foyer 1. OG

The Astropy Project: a community effort for a common software developent platform in Python — •Derek Homeier — Aperio Software Ltd. — The Astropy Team

Astropy is a project developing a common core platform for astronomical software in Python. Since the early 2010s Python has been recognised as a powerful alternative to data analysis platforms like IDL or Matlab, or compiled languages like Fortran and C++, for scientific data processing in the astrophysics research community. Numerical computation and visualisation needs led to significant contributions to evolving modules like Numpy and Matplotlib; yet individual needs also started to set off a proliferation of independent solutions. Astropy was created to foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages, sharing common coding standards and data APIs, to allow and actively encourage contributors from the community to invest their development work into a widely usable professional package.

A decade later this has made Python+Astropy now the dominant data-processing platform in astrophysical research. It is the basis for many observatories' data analysis tools, including STScI and JWST, and has a partner project in heliophysics, Sunpy. These efforts have been recognised by awards such as the IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper and most recently the Lancelot M. Berkeley-New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy, and they are for the first time funded on a mid-long term basis under the NASA ROSES programme. With this growth the project has also evolved into a more formally organised and structured system.

Keywords: software; data science; astrophysics; heliophysics