The Astropy Project is excited to announce that the first Astropy paper has reached 10,000 citations, as tracked by the Astrophysics Data System.
Astropy is a community-driven project that develops the astropy Python package along with other libraries and tools that enable astronomical research software. The Astropy Project has published three journal articles that mark significant milestones for the project, coinciding with the initial announcement of the project, version 2.0 of the core package, and version 5.0 of the core package, respectively.
Since its inception just over 10 years ago, Astropy has become a core pillar of astronomical research, laying the foundation for thousands of software packages and enabling over 10,000 published research projects. This milestone demonstrates the impact Astropy has had on astronomy research and reflects the potential impact of scientific software. Other recent milestones include the ADASS Software Prize in 2022 and the 2025 Berkeley Prize.
The Astropy Project is not a centralized institution or endeavor: The astropy Python package contains contributions from over 500 unique contributors and the governing bodies of the project are located at a range of universities and institutes with members spanning junior to senior positions in both academic and non-academic careers. While many have contributed to Astropy, the majority of the effort in the project was done by a much smaller group of 20–25 core contributors and maintainers.
Astropy has benefitted from and is grateful for grant funding from the Moore Foundation and NASA over the years. However, most of the project was developed through volunteer effort or in-kind contributions from institutions such as Space Telescope Science Institute and the Chandra X-ray Center, and more recently the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute. Astropy also receives support as a Sponsored Project with NumFOCUS, which provides services in funding and infrastructure for open source scientific computing projects. Infrastructure software like Astropy is critical to the success of modern astronomy, and we hope that the community will continue to support the project in the future through funding and contributions.
