Repository navigation
astropy: A Community Python Library for Astronomy #251
Description
Submitting Author: @pllim
All current maintainers: @astropy
Package Name: astropy
One-Line Description of Package: A Community Python Library for Astronomy
Repository Link: https://github.com/astropy/astropy
Version submitted: 7.1.0
EiC: @yeelauren
Editor: @crhea93
Reviewer 1: @adityapt
Reviewer 2: @egbdfX
Archive: 10.5281/zenodo.17756022
Version accepted: 7.1.0
Date accepted (month/day/year): 12/17/2025
Code of Conduct & Commitment to Maintain Package
- I agree to abide by pyOpenSci's Code of Conduct during the review process and in maintaining my package after should it be accepted.
- I have read and will commit to package maintenance after the review as per the pyOpenSci Policies Guidelines.
Description
- Include a brief paragraph describing what your package does:
The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a core package for astronomy using the Python programming language and improve usability, interoperability, and collaboration between astronomy Python packages. The core astropy package contains functionality aimed at professional astronomers and astrophysicists, but may be useful to anyone developing astronomy software. The Astropy Project also includes "affiliated packages," Python packages that are not necessarily developed by the core development team, but share the goals of Astropy, and often build from the core package's code and infrastructure.
Scope
-
Please indicate which category or categories.
Check out our package scope page to learn more about our
scope. (If you are unsure of which category you fit, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry):- Data retrieval
- Data extraction
- Data processing/munging
- Data deposition
- Data validation and testing
- Data visualization1
- Workflow automation
- Citation management and bibliometrics
- Scientific software wrappers (wcslib?)
- Database interoperability
Domain Specific
- Geospatial
- Education
Community Partnerships
If your package is associated with an
existing community please check below:
- Astropy:My package adheres to Astropy community standards
- Pangeo: My package adheres to the Pangeo standards listed in the pyOpenSci peer review guidebook
-
For all submissions, explain how and why the package falls under the categories you indicated above. In your explanation, please address the following points (briefly, 1-2 sentences for each):
-
Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package? Target audience are people involved in astrophysics or astronomy who use Python. astropy is the core library that the Astropy Project builds upon.
-
Are there other Python packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ? No.
-
If you made a pre-submission enquiry, please paste the link to the corresponding issue, forum post, or other discussion, or
@tagthe editor you contacted:
-
Technical checks
For details about the pyOpenSci packaging requirements, see our packaging guide. Confirm each of the following by checking the box. This package:
- does not violate the Terms of Service of any service it interacts with.
- uses an OSI approved license.
- contains a README with instructions for installing the development version.
- includes documentation with examples for all functions.
- contains a tutorial with examples of its essential functions and uses.
- has a test suite.
- has continuous integration setup, such as GitHub Actions CircleCI, and/or others.
Publication Options
- Do you wish to automatically submit to the Journal of Open Source Software? If so:
JOSS Checks
- The package has an obvious research application according to JOSS's definition in their submission requirements. Be aware that completing the pyOpenSci review process does not guarantee acceptance to JOSS. Be sure to read their submission requirements (linked above) if you are interested in submitting to JOSS.
- The package is not a "minor utility" as defined by JOSS's submission requirements: "Minor ‘utility’ packages, including ‘thin’ API clients, are not acceptable." pyOpenSci welcomes these packages under "Data Retrieval", but JOSS has slightly different criteria.
- The package contains a
paper.mdmatching JOSS's requirements with a high-level description in the package root or ininst/. (I can add that later; out of time today.) - The package is deposited in a long-term repository with the DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/15473616
Note: JOSS accepts our review as theirs. You will NOT need to go through another full review. JOSS will only review your paper.md file. Be sure to link to this pyOpenSci issue when a JOSS issue is opened for your package. Also be sure to tell the JOSS editor that this is a pyOpenSci reviewed package once you reach this step.
Are you OK with Reviewers Submitting Issues and/or pull requests to your Repo Directly?
This option will allow reviewers to open smaller issues that can then be linked to PR's rather than submitting a more dense text based review. It will also allow you to demonstrate addressing the issue via PR links.
- Yes I am OK with reviewers submitting requested changes as issues to my repo. Reviewers will then link to the issues in their submitted review.
Confirm each of the following by checking the box.
- I have read the author guide.
- I expect to maintain this package for at least 2 years and can help find a replacement for the maintainer (team) if needed.
Please fill out our survey
- Last but not least please fill out our pre-review survey. This helps us track
submission and improve our peer review process. We will also ask our reviewers
and editors to fill this out. (I can fill this out later; out of time today.)
P.S. Have feedback/comments about our review process? Leave a comment here
Editor and Review Templates
The editor template can be found here.
The review template can be found here.
Footnotes
-
Please fill out a pre-submission inquiry before submitting a data visualization package. ↩
Metadata
Metadata
Assignees
Type
Projects
- Status
Activity
pllim commentedon Jul 14, 2025
Note to self: sunpy did it here #147
Side discussion: #252
lwasser commentedon Jul 21, 2025
This review is on pause while the community decides if they want to move forward! @eliotwrobson just letting you know !! i'll add a label
eteq commentedon Aug 22, 2025
@lwasser - I think we want to move ahead with this review but just wanted to confirm a few things:
This package is of course a much larger package than most pyOpenSci reviews. We (the Astropy Coordination Committee) are guessing that the expected level of review is comparable to what sunpy got in #147 - i.e., a bit more high-level of a review and not e.g. expecting the reviewer to confirm every single public function has complete docstrings. Assuming that's what you're thinking as well we are happy to have the process continue. But we do not want to create undue burden on some poor reviewer or editor (nor on our own maintainers given they aren't necessarily all signed up for this). So please advise, if that sounds right to you we are happy to move forward with this.
lwasser commentedon Sep 3, 2025
@eteq, my apologies for the delay in responding here. I took a vacation!
In terms of moving forward, yes, we would definitely expect that the Astropy review would be more high-level and similar to what SunPy went through. I think the next step will be to figure out who can lead this as editor. Will @dhomeier and @hamogu have a conflict of interest (I am not familiar with who works on what parts of Astropy!). cc: @pllim
Let's figure that out together and then we can begin to move things forward!
hamogu commentedon Sep 4, 2025
I think this is best served by an editor other than me and @dhomeier . I'm not too worried about a conflict of interest, but the package is just so big and so established, that the most beneficial would be a really outside perspective, both for the editor and the reviewers. Every potential reviewer within the astropy community has worked on that package themselves in some form other the years (weather through code contributions or community discussions or some other means) and the packaging standards, layout, testing, docs etc., are what is to be considered the standard that other atrocities package should looks for.
So, if this review has any use, I think it's going to be that of an outside perspective. On the other hand, no specific astronomy skills are needed - we don't expect the reviewer to scrutinize e.g. how tile-compressed fits arrays with BZERO metadata are handled or how the redshift and distance of a galaxy depend on the exact value of the Hubble constant - those things are vetted carefully within the community already.
pllim commentedon Sep 4, 2025
If no one else, I am sure @Cadair will not be shy to point those out... 😆
lwasser commentedon Sep 4, 2025
Ok! I think finding the right editor and reviewers will be the tricky part here. I'll sync with @eliotwrobson on how to move this one forward!!
Because most of the astro community has likely contributed to this package, perhaps we look for one reviewer who is more focused on the package and usability, and another who, if they have contributed, has made small contributions (not a maintainer). Does that sound reasonable to you all?
pllim commentedon Oct 3, 2025
Thank you for choosing to proceed with this! Please let us know if you have questions or concerns that Astropy can assist with.
48 remaining items
pllim commentedon Dec 18, 2025
I don't think astropy write blogs but I can ask...
crhea93 commentedon Dec 18, 2025
@pllim Thank you very much for putting that all together so quickly! Congratulations again on the submission!!
@lwasser I believe we can close this now?
pllim commentedon Dec 18, 2025
I feel like it is more proper to merge the badge PR astropy/astropy#19065 after this is closed. What do you think? Thanks, all!
crhea93 commentedon Dec 18, 2025
@pllim I don't have any issue with that!
pllim commentedon Jan 5, 2026
Hello again. What is the next step here? Thanks!
crhea93 commentedon Jan 12, 2026
@pllim There are no additional steps on your end! I'm just waiting for the OK from @lwasser to close the issue :D
pllim commentedon Jan 20, 2026
Huh, somehow astropy is already showing up at https://www.pyopensci.org/python-packages.html even though this issue is still open.
pllim commentedon Jan 20, 2026
However, a couple of places look weird. Please see screenshot below:
crhea93 commentedon Jan 20, 2026
@pllim Thank you for pointing this out! @lwasser do you know how this could be fixed?
hamogu commentedon Jan 21, 2026
@pllim The script for the website uses the labels, not the open/closed status of the issue. Issues with label "6 - approved" are listed. It's common that issues stay open longer, in particular if the package also wants a JOSS article. The JOSS review only starts after PyOS accepts a package, so we don't want to wait for the JOSS formalities to go through before listing on our webpage.
pllim commentedon Jan 22, 2026
Do we have a follow-up issue to follow up on the wrong listed info as mentioned in #251 (comment) ? Thanks!
lwasser commentedon Jan 23, 2026
Hi friends @pllim, Yesterday, after chatting with @crhea93, I realized I had broken the astropy page while debugging another page. The
Hello therewas me debugging some messy liquid. That should all be fixed now. My apologies for that miss when I merged! I was focused on another page not astropy!The list of maintainers on that card comes from the YAML in this issue. Right now, this is what it looks like (please scroll up to the top) .
SO, I know you have a huge team for astropy, and my question is, should we just add the team link and the head maintainers? or what would be best here? This is the first package that has such a large maintainer team (which we love!!). But our current script parses that field for gh usernames and commas and so it doesn't know how to handle what is currently there!
Let's brainstorm what might work best. And we can do that here or in Slack - I'm sorry I've missed pings here.
lwasser commentedon Jan 23, 2026
So if you were to update the maintainers today, and we can manually retrigger a build, it would fix the card. But if we want a link or something that is not a github username list, we will need to update our build to accept that
pllim commentedon Jan 23, 2026
To be consistent with astropy citation, I would go with "Astropy Collaboration" but that is being discussed over at astropy/astropy.github.com#700 (cc @hamogu and @dhomeier)
Regardless, it is best not to list people individually.