Lifetime Contributors¶

Here we list individuals who estimate they have spent 2000 hours or more, equivalent to full time for a year, working on and contributing to the Astropy Project. These individuals have demonstrated a long-term commitment to the project in many areas and exemplify the high standards we seek to achieve.

Adrian Price-Whelan

Adrian is the lead coordinator and developer behind the Learn Astropy and Astropy tutorials initiatives. He was an initial contributor of the concept and code for the Quantity class in astropy.units and serves as lead developer of astropy.coordinates. In the latter role he played a key role in adding support for velocity data such as proper motions in astropy.coordinates.

Brigitta Sipőcz

Since coming to the project as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student in 2014, Brigitta has been an active and valued member of the Astropy community in many key roles. Most notably, she has developed and maintains responsibility for critical parts of the Astropy infrastructure which keep the core package and affiliated packages running smoothly for both testing and release distribution. She serves as an astropy core release manager and serves as the GSoC coordinator for Astropy.

Erik Tollerud

Erik has played a key leadership and technical role in the Astropy project since it began in 2011. His individual contributions are too numerous to name, but they include contributing large parts of the core coordinates and uncertainties packages, serving in the Coordination Committee since 2011, serving as a release manager and a number of infrastructure roles, providing leadership on writing the Astropy papers and proposals, and Finance committee work.

Kelle Cruz

Kelle has served on the Coordination Committee since 2016 with a focus on community management, user discussion forums, workshops, and expanding educational materials. Her role as the Learn Coordinator has been especially impacting. She has played a crucial lead role in the areas of governance, fundraising, and grant writing as Astropy has grown into a large and widely recognized project.

Larry Bradley

Larry has served as the lead developer and maintainer of the Photutils package (an Astropy coordinated package for source detection and photometry) since 2014. He also serves as a maintainer of the astropy regions package and the astropy visualization, stats, and convolution subpackages.

Madison Bray

Madison was a founding member of the Astropy project and was the main developer of the io.fits core subpackage which forms the basis of much of the I/O for astropy. After taking a hiatus from Astropy in 2016 for another opportunity, Madison rejoined in the role of DevOps and Operations Support in 2020.

Marten van Kerkwijk

Marten has been actively involved in astropy core development since 2013. He has made many key contributions, most notably leading the effort to make Quantities truly useful throughout astropy by making interaction with numpy functions seamless and ensuring they work well inside coordinates. He led the development of algorithm improvements in the Time class to ensure accuracy at the level needed for pulsar timing, and he played an important role in making the Table class versatile.

Michael Droettboom

Michael was a prolific contributor to Astropy from 2011 through 2015, contributing over 400 pull requests in many areas of the core, with a focus on the wcs, votable, and table subpackages. His deep understanding of best coding practices provided important inspiration for other members of the initial core development team.

Moritz Guenther

Moritz has been involved in the project since 2011, with contributions to the io.ascii package and a continuing role as a package maintainer. He has also contributed to the stats core subpackage and the photutils and saba packages. Since 2020, Moritz has been serving as an Affiliated Package review editor and has been an active member of the interim Finance Committee

Nadia Dencheva

Nadia has been an active member of the project since it started, where she has been the lead developer and maintainer for the modeling and wcs packages. She has also been involved with the serialization of astropy objects to the ASDF format.

Perry Greenfield

More than any other single person, Perry has been responsible for the adoption of Python in astronomy. He recognized the promise of Python as a language for astronomical data analysis and processing far before the rest of the community and was responsible for an institutional commitment of substantial resources in this direction. Perry was a key player in the initial formation of the Astropy project and served as a Coordination Committee member from 2011 to 2016. In 2020, Perry took on the role of Ombudsperson.

Pey Lian Lim

Pey Lian has been an important team member since 2012, providing key infrastructure and operational support focused on the core package. In her maintainer roles for testing and documentation infrastructure and DevOps and Operations Support, she keeps Astropy running. Special commendation is due for leading the extremely rapid and unexpected migration from Travis CI to GitHub Actions in 2020. Pey Lian's tireless attention in triaging core issues is well-recognized.

Simon Conseil

After a first pull request in 2012, Simon became a regular contributor to Astropy around 2015. Since 2017 he has been the main maintainer of io.fits, taking on the daunting role of managing this complex and critical subpackage. He also contributes other parts of Astropy including infrastructure, modeling, io.ascii, stats, table, and visualization.

Tom Aldcroft

In 2011, Tom was part of an initial core group that recognized the need for a common Astropy package for the community, and he helped organize the first official Astropy coordination meeting. Since that time he has been an active contributor to the project, taking a lead role in the development and maintenance of three core subpackages: table, time, and io.ascii. In 2016 he was appointed as one of the Astropy Project Coordination Committee members.

Tom Robitaille

Tom has been a recognized leader in the Astropy project since it began, being part of the core group that started the project and organized the first Astropy coordination meeting. His individual contributions are too numerous to name, but they include contributing large parts of the core package covering many areas (with an amazing 740+ merged pull requests as of 2021-March), developing the astropy-healpix and regions coordinated packages, serving as a release manager, GSoC coordinator, and member of the Coordination Committee.

Biannual Contributors¶

Here we list individuals who estimate that they have devoted a significant amount of time working on and contributing to the Astropy Project during each period covered by the biannual Astropy roles survey. The cumulative effort of these individuals each year have allowed the project to continue growing and supporting the needs of the ever-larger community of scientists and institutions that depend on the Astropy Project.

2021-January

2 days / week

Larry Bradley, Pey Lian Lim, Tom Robitaille (?)

1 day / week

Brigitta Sipőcz, Derek Homeier, Erik Tollerud, Marten van Kerkwijk, Nadia Dencheva, Tom Aldcroft

4 hours / week

Clara Brasseur, David Shupe, Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez, Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez, Tom Donaldson, Simon Conseil

2 hours /week

Adam Ginsburg, Adrian Price-Whelan, Brett Morris, Kelle Cruz, Lia Corrales, Mihai Cara, Moritz Guenther, Ole Streicher, Sergio Pascual, Stuart Littlefair

Institutional Support¶

Here we recognize the institutions who have made major contributions to the Astropy project by either direct funding to the project or by indirect funding of employees who have contributed.

Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

STScI has played a foundational role in the development and advancement of the Astropy project since the inception of the project. STScI has provided continued and very substantial indirect funding support to the project via staff contributions since 2011. The Astropy project would like to specially recognize STScI for the vision and on-going support to both Astropy and the larger scientific Python computing ecosystem.

Moore Foundation

In late 2019 the Astropy project was awarded a $900k grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This 3-year grant is targeted at supporting Astropy’s transition to a fully sustainable project, where success no longer hinges on a limited set of contributors. The project is tremendously grateful to the Moore Foundation for the generous and well-timed grant.

Chandra X-ray Center (CXC)

The CXC has supported one staff member contributing to Astropy at a level of around 30% FTE since 2011 and a second staff member at about 15% since 2018 (?). We thank the CXC for supporting staff scientists who devote their independent research time to developing Astropy.

NumFocus

We wish to express gratitude to the NumFocus Organization for providing the organizational support to grow Astropy into the role of a community-leading project with a substantial budget.

Astropy Credits¶