# Welcome to galpy’s documentation¶

galpy is a Python 2 and 3 package for galactic dynamics. It supports orbit integration in a variety of potentials, evaluating and sampling various distribution functions, and the calculation of action-angle coordinates for all static potentials. galpy is an astropy affiliated package and provides full support for astropy’s Quantity framework for variables with units.

galpy is developed on GitHub. If you are looking to report an issue or for information on how to contribute to the code, please head over to galpy’s GitHub page for more information.

As a preview of the kinds of things you can do with galpy, here’s a video introducing some of the new features in galpy v1.5:

## Acknowledging galpy¶

If you use galpy in a publication, please cite the following paper

• galpy: A Python Library for Galactic Dynamics, Jo Bovy (2015), Astrophys. J. Supp., 216, 29 (arXiv/1412.3451).

and link to http://github.com/jobovy/galpy. Some of the code’s functionality is introduced in separate papers:

galpy has been used in more than 200 scientific publications in the astrophysical literature. Covering topics as diverse as the properties of planetary systems around distant stars, the kinematics of pulsars and stars ejected from the Milky Way by supernova explosions, binary evolution in stellar clusters, chemo-dynamical modeling of stellar populations in the Milky Way, and the dynamics of satellites around external galaxies, galpy is widely used throughout astrophysics.