My GSoC 2026 Journey: Hardening Astropy's Core Stability

I'm applying for GSoC 2026 with OpenAstronomy to work on "Hardening Astropy's Core Stability" under mentors neutrinoceros, astrofrog, and nstarman. What is Astropy? Astropy is the core Python library for astronomy. It powers spectral analysis, coordinate transforms, time parsing, and cosmological calculations used by researchers worldwide. The Problem Astropy has C and Cython extensions that handle performance-critical operations. These are currently tested only indirectly through the public Python API. A bug in the compiled layer can sit undetected for a long time. My project aims to build a direct, low-level test suite for these extensions. What I've Done So Far I've already contributed 12 PRs to Astropy, with 8 merged, including: Found and fixed a missing goto fail in parse_times.c Added direct tests for the scalar_inv_efuncs Cython extension Fixed bugs in stats, units, table, and time subpackages What's Next During GSoC I'll extend this test suite to cover all major C/Cython extens