ANN: astropy 7.2 released

[Thomas Robitaille]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the v7.2.0 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:

- A faster ECSV table reader
- Generic DataFrame conversion methods
- Table index improvements and deprecation
- Cosmology traits
- An option to preserve units in FITS-WCS
- Concatenation and stacking of coordinates and time classes

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/7.2.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 v7.2.0 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
v7.2.0 Release Coordinator
on behalf of The Astropy Project