It is from the same author. He semi-retired pyephem with the release of this project¹: "The Skyfield astronomy library should be preferred over PyEphem for new projects. Its modern design encourages better Python code, and uses NumPy to accelerate its calculations."
I switched a few toys I'd written from pyephem to skyfield, and it felt like a large improvement. (Must note that they really were toys though, so the amount of work wasn't huge in my case).