The SunPy project would like to announce the release of its latest version v0.5.0. SunPy is a, rapidly developing, Python package for obtaining, visualising and analysing solar physics data. SunPy provides tools for querying and downloading data from online services like the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO), the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK) and other sources of data such as the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) for SDO data and other providers such as the GOES X-ray flux archive. The core of SunPy is data types that hold data and metadata associated with that data. These objects provide a consistent interface to different data sources, allowing all data to be coordinate aware and have access to other metadata and common methods. Also included in SunPy are utility functions for physical coordinate transformations and commonly used constants and other solar related helper functions. Finally, SunPy provides tools to visualise and explore the data both interactively and statically in a publication-ready fashion.
The SunPy library is built on and makes extensive use of the fantastic Scientific Python ecosystem which extends the Python programming language in a modular fashion to be able to perform almost any scientific computing task. The main packages used by SunPy are Numpy, SciPy, matplotlib, Pandas and Astropy. Recent and future versions of SunPy are including more and deeper integration with the Astropy library for operations shared between solar and other astronomical data.
SunPy is free and open-source software (BSD licence), and can be downloaded from http://sunpy.org or via standard Python package installation methods. Full installation instructions for installing SunPy and suggestions on how to install the Scientific Python ecosystem on your computer can be found in the SunPy installation documentation http://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/guide/installation.
For more information about SunPy, to get in contact or if you just fancy a chat you can either look at http://sunpy.org/about, email sunpy@googlegroups.com or join our IRC chat room #SunPy on freenode.net (https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/#SunPy).
The SunPy library is community-developed and managed by the SunPy project which is led by an elected board. The library currently contains contributions from 34 people and all contributions are welcome, big or small. The SunPy code and development makes use of GitHub a website for social coding and collaboration on coding projects, you can find SunPy’s GitHub presence here: http://github.com/sunpy/sunpy.