ANN: astropy 6.1.0 released

[Thomas Robitaille]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v6.1.0 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:

- Warnings are now emitted when carrying out order-dependent angular separation calculations
- Cosmology classes are now Python dataclasses
- Compatibility with the upcoming major Numpy 2.0 release
- Changes to the meaning of the copy= argument when using Numpy 2.0
- io.ascii now uses 64-bit integers by default for integer numerical data on all platforms
- Minimum supported version of Python updated to 3.10

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/6.1.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 v6.1 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
v6.1 Release Coordinator
on behalf of The Astropy Project