The pandas package is a package for high performance data analysis of table-like structures that is complementary to the Table class in Astropy.
In order to be able to easily exchange data between the Table class and the pandas DataFrame class (the main data structure in pandas), the Table class includes two methods, to_pandas() and from_pandas().
To demonstrate these, we can create a simple table:
>>> from astropy.table import Table
>>> t = Table()
>>> t['a'] = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> t['b'] = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
which we can then convert to a pandas DataFrame:
>>> df = t.to_pandas()
>>> df
a b
0 1 a
1 2 b
2 3 c
3 4 d
>>> type(df)
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
It is also possible to create a table from a DataFrame:
>>> t2 = Table.from_pandas(df)
>>> t2
<Table length=4>
a b
int64 string8
----- -------
1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
The conversions to/from pandas are subject to the following caveats: