This month the poliastro repository has crossed ⭐️ 500 GitHub stars ⭐️, thanks everyone for believing in the project!

Juan Luis released version 0.15.2 with a fix for newer astroquery versions, as well as compatibility with Plotly 5.0, which allows users to install all the required JupyterLab extensions without Node.js. This will make the installation process much easier!

Yash and Jorge had a very productive month: after a lot of discussion in our weekly community calls and several rounds of code reviews, we finally have eclipse event detection merged! Yash has passed the first Google Summer of Code evaluation with flying colors and will publish an entry in our blog soon. The work Jorge did on our validation infrastructure as part of the NumFOCUS Small Development Grant has proven to be extremely useful. In addition, Yash has also …

The first (and hopefully) only beta of poliastro 0.15 is out! 🎉 It took us a bit longer to get this release out, but we are happy that poliastro 0.15 is now around the corner. We will soon write detailed release notes and a proper announcement for it, and in the meanwhile you can read the preliminary poliastro 0.15 changelog.

Juan Luis revamped our website a bit, by adjusting our domain names and improving the navigation bar (twice). Besides, he has finished the reorganization of our docs following the Diátaxis Framework by Daniele Procida, prepared for the upcoming Sphinx 4.0 release, and updated our installation and contribution instructions.

Jorge has finished validating our planetary transformations against GMAT and Orekit, which required reaching out to the Orekit developers and adjusting one outdated constant in poliastro. This wraps up …

poliastro finally landed support for Python 3.9, thanks to the fine folks of numba! Their release candidate already works with the newest Python release, and we've been told that the stable release is around the corner. This means that the next stable release of poliastro will also support it 🚀

On the validation side, Jorge has been working on more enhancements, and we have finally confirmed that our 3D impulsive maneuvers give the same result as GMAT and Orekit! You can read the full details in this blog post.

And finally, we have made some small improvements on the development side, by fixing some continuous integration small failures, reducing the number of warnings in our tests, and other small fixes. Thanks Yash, Dhruv, zkl2, and Souhit!

We got awarded a Small Development Grant by NumFOCUS to validate poliastro against commercial and non-commercial similar applications! 🎉 Jorge started by setting GitHub Actions to trigger the validations automatically, validating our conversion between cartesian and Keplerian elements against Orekit, and is now fighting some discrepancies with Hohmann transfers.

On the development front, while we wait for Numba to release Python 3.9-compatible wheels for our next release, we refactored our Cowell propagator to make the code simpler and more numba-friendly, we tried to merge Eleftheria's implementation of the Escobal method for satellite visibility (and sadly got blocked in the process), and kept working on our analysis of Walker constellations for the OpenSatCom activity. We also engaged with the authors of the awesome numbakit-ode to rewrite our Cowell method using numba, but found some issues along the way and we decided …

We are glad to announce that poliastro will accept student applications during Google Summer of Code 2019, thanks to the umbrella organization OpenAstronomy! 🚀

For the newcomers, poliastro is a pure Python library that allows you to easily simulate and visualize interplanetary orbits in an interactive way, used by people from all around the world. Sounds interesting? Read on!

What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code (from now on, GSOC) is, according to its own website:

a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

GSOC is the inspiration for the Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS), a similar program organized by the European Space Agency in which we also participated, with great success.

The …

A month ago I had the privilege to attend the Python in Astronomy 2018 conference, which gave me an unique perspective of the status of Python in the astronomical sciences and an opportunity to present poliastro to a very technical audience. I was planning to post a writeup somewhere, and as the Zen of Python says...

$ python -c "import this" | grep Now
Now is better than never.

So, let's do it! 🚀

What was Python in Astronomy?

Python in Astronomy (from now on, PyAstro18) is best explained in its website:

This conference aims to bring a wide variety of people who use, develop or teach people about Python packages in the context of all forms of Astronomy. The conference will include presentations, tutorials, unconference sessions, and sprints. As well as enhancing the community around astronomical uses of Python, the conference aims …

We are glad to announce that poliastro will accept student applications during Google Summer of Code this year, thanks to the umbrella organization OpenAstronomy! 🚀

For the newcomers, poliastro is a pure Python library that allows you to easily simulate and visualize interplanetary orbits in an interactive way, used by people from all around the world. Sounds interesting? Read on!

What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code (from now on, GSOC) is, according to its own website:

a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

GSOC is the inspiration for the Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS), a similar program organized by the European Space Agency in which we also participated last year, with …

It fills us with astronomical joy to announce the release of poliastro 0.7.0! 🚀

For the newcomers, poliastro is a pure Python library that allows you to simulate and analyze interplanetary orbits in a Jupyter notebook in an interactive and easy way, used by people from all around the world. Sounds interesting? Read on!

This release is the biggest one since the creation of the project in terms of code changes and new features, and on behalf of the poliastro development team I would like to deeply thank the European Space Agency for the SOCIS grant that made it possible. Besides, I would like to officially welcome Antonio Hidalgo to the team, since in reward for his amazing work during SOCIS he gained write access to the repository. ¡Bienvenido Antonio!

As always, the easiest way to get poliastro in …