ANN: astropy 7.1 released

[Thomas Robitaille]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v7.1.0 release of astropy, a core
Python package for Astronomy:

http://www.astropy.org

The astropy core package is a community-driven Python package intended
to contain much of the core functionality and common tools needed for
astronomy and astrophysics. It is part of the Astropy Project, which
aims to foster an ecosystem of interoperable astronomy packages for
Python.

Notable changes in this release include:

- Trailing whitespace in Table string columns can now be stripped
- Reading and writing TDAT files with astropy.io.ascii
- Constructing, accessing, and storing covariance matrices for
N-dimensional data
- Fast CSV reader using PyArrow
- Cosmology traits
- Get an astropy built-in frame out of a VOTable’s coosys element
- New astropy.io.votable.dataorigin module
- Access to fit information when using parallel_fit_dask

In addition, hundreds of smaller improvements and fixes have been made.
An overview of the changes is provided at:

http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/7.1.html

Instructions for installing astropy are provided on our website, and
extensive documentation can be found at:

http://docs.astropy.org

If you usually use pip to install packages, you can do:

pip install astropy --upgrade

If you make use of conda (such as through the Anaconda Python
Distribution), you should soon be able update to Astropy v7.1.0 with:

conda update astropy

Or if you cannot wait for Anaconda to update their default version, you
can use the conda-forge channel:

conda update -c conda-forge astropy

Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub
repository:

https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues

Over 500 people have contributed code to the core astropy package so
far, and you can find out more about the team here:

https://www.astropy.org/team.html

If you use astropy directly for your work, or as a dependency to
another package, please remember to acknowledge it by citing the
appropriate Astropy paper. For the most up-to-date suggestions, see the
acknowledgement page.

We hope that you enjoy using astropy as much as we enjoyed developing
it!

Thomas Robitaille
v7.1.0 Release Coordinator
on behalf of The Astropy Project