Gala is a Python package for Galactic and gravitational dynamics.

The documentation for Gala is hosted on Read the docs.

The easiest way to get Gala is to install with pip or uv.

Gala can be installed with pip (with uv or standalone):

pip install gala

You can also add gala as a dependency to your environment with:

uv add gala

See the installation instructions in the documentation for more information.

If you make use of this code, please cite the JOSS paper:

@article{gala,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.00388},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105%2Fjoss.00388},
  year = 2017,
  month = {oct},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {2},
  number = {18},
  author = {Adrian M. Price-Whelan},
  title = {Gala: A Python package for galactic dynamics},
  journal = {The Journal of Open Source Software}
}

Please also cite the Zenodo DOI as a software citation - see the documentation for up to date citation information.

Copyright 2013-2026 Adrian Price-Whelan and contributors.

Gala is free software made available under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.

See the AUTHORS.rst file for a complete list of contributors to the project.