astropy v6.1.0rc1 ready for testing

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

The first release candidate (RC) of the core astropy package for the v6.1.0 release is now available and ready for testing! This is happening a bit sooner than originally planned to make sure that we release the final version of astropy v6.1.0 prior to the major numpy v2.0 release.

If you are interested in trying it out, you can install this release candidate by doing:

pip install astropy --pre

or

pip install astropy==6.1.0rc1

You can find the documentation corresponding to this release at:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v6.1.x/

including the full list of changes for this release:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v6.1.x/changelog.html

as well as a 'What's new in v6.1?' page:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v6.1.x/whatsnew/6.1.html

We would appreciate if you could try out this RC and report back any success or failure via the following wiki page:

https://github.com/astropy/astropy/wiki/v6.1.0-RC-testing

For example, you can try running the test suite as mentioned on the wiki page. In addition, if you maintain any packages that use astropy, please check that your package(s) works well with this RC and let us know if there are any issues or whether everything works fine. There is a section to list packages that work/don't work at the bottom of the wiki page. Please also open an issue in the astropy core package issue tracker for any issues you encounter (and open separate issues for each problem you run into).

If you use conda, be sure to either remove the existing conda astropy package or make a new environment before installing the RC. Note that there are no conda packages for the RC.

Thanks!
Tom (release manager for v6.1)