GNU Astronomy Utilities - News
Gnuastro 0.4 released
Item posted by Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi> on Wed 13 Sep 2017 04:07:35 PM UTC.
I am happy to announce that the fourth release of Gnuastro now available.
GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is an official GNU package consisting of various command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of astronomical data. All the programs share the same basic command-line user interface for the comfort of both the users and developers. For the full list of Gnuastro's library and programs please see the links below, respectively:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html
The emphasis in this release has mainly been on features to improve the user experience of Gnuastro's programs. The full list of major new/changed features in this release can be seen in the NEWS file and is also appended to this announcement below [*].
Here are the compressed sources for this release:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.tar.gz (4.4MB)
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.tar.lz (3.0MB)
Here are the GPG detached signatures[**]:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.tar.gz.sig
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.tar.lz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth (may need a day or two to sync):
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnuastro
Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:
a5d68d008ee5de9197907a35b3002988 gnuastro-0.4.tar.gz
9b79efe278645c1510444bd42e48b83f gnuastro-0.4.tar.lz
c6113658a119a9de785b04f4baceb3f7e6560360 gnuastro-0.4.tar.gz
69317d10d13ac72fdaa627a03ed77a4e307d4cb7 gnuastro-0.4.tar.lz
I am very grateful to Vladimir Markelov for contributions to the code of this release and (in alphabetical order) to Marjan Akbari, Fernando Buitrago, Adrian Bunk, Antonio Diaz Diaz, Mosè Giordano, Stephen Hamer, Raúl Infante Sainz, Aurélien Jarno, Alan Lefor, Guillaume Mahler, William Pence, Ole Streicher, Ignacio Trujillo and David Valls-Gabaud for their great suggestions, help and bug reports that made this release possible.
Gnuastro 0.4 tarball was bootstrapped (built) with the following tools:
- Texinfo 6.4
- Autoconf 2.69
- Automake 1.15.1
- Libtool 2.4.6
- Help2man 1.47.4
- Gnulib v0.1-1593-g9d3e8e18d
- Autoconf Archives v2017.03.21-138-g37a7575
Note that these are not installation dependencies, for those, please see
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html
Cheers,
Mohammad
--
Mohammad Akhlaghi,
Postdoctoral research fellow,
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL),
Observatoire de Lyon. 9, Avenue Charles André,
Saint Genis Laval (69230), France.
NEWS file for this release
New features
- All programs: `.fit' is now a recognized FITS file suffix.
- All programs: ASCII text files (tables) created with CRLF line terminators (for example text files created in MS Windows) are now also readable as input when necessary.
- Arithmetic: now has a new `--globalhdu' (`-g') option which can be used once for all the input images.
- MakeNoise: with the new `--sigma' (`-s') option, it is now possible to directly request the noise sigma or standard deviation. When this option is called, the `--background', `--zeropoint' and other option values will be ignored.
- MakeProfiles: the new `--kernel' option can make a kernel image without the need to define a catalog. With this option, a catalog (or accompanying background image) must not be given.
- MakeProfiles: the new `--pc', `--cunit' and `--ctype' options can be used to specify the PC matrix, CUNIT and CTYPE world coordinate system keywords of the output FITS file.
- MakeProfiles: the new `distance' profile will save the radial distance of each pixel. This may be used to define your own profiles that are not currently supported in MakeProfiles.
- MakeProfiles: with the new `--mcolisbrightness' ("mcol-is-brightness") option, the `--mcol' values of the catalog will be interpretted as total brightness (sum of pixel values), not magnitude.
- NoiseChisel: with the new `--dilatengb' option, it is now possible to identify the connectivity of the final dilation.
- Library: Functions that read data from an ASCII text file (`gal_txt_table_info', `gal_txt_table_read', `gal_txt_image_read') now also operate on files with CRLF line terminators.
Changed features
- Crop: The new `--center' option is now used to define the center of a single crop. Hence the old `--ra', `--dec', `--xc', `--yc' have been removed. This new option can take multiple values (one value for each dimension). Fractions are also acceptable.
- Crop: The new `--width' option is now used to define the width of a single crop. Hence the old `--iwidth', `--wwidth' were removed. The units to interpret the value to the option are specified by the `--mode' option. With the new `--width' option it is also possible to define a non-square crop (different widths along each dimension). In WCS mode, its units are no longer arcseconds but are the same units of the WCS (degrees for angles). `--width' can also accept fractions. So to set a width of 5 arcseconds, you can give it a value of `5/3600' for the angular dimensions.
- Crop: The new `--coordcol' option is now used to determine the catalog columns that define coordinates. Hence the old `--racol', `--deccol', `--xcol', and `--ycol' have been removed. This new option can be called multiple times and the order of its calling will be used for the column containing the center in the respective dimension (in FITS format).
- MakeNoise: the old `--stdadd' (`-s') option has been renamed to `--instrumental' (`-i') to be more clear.
- MakeProfiles: The new `--naxis' and `--shift' options can take multiple values for each dimension (separated by a comma). This replaces the old `--naxis1', `--naxis2' and `--xshift' and `--yshift' options.
- MakeProfiles: The new `--ccol' option can take the center coordinate columns of the catalog (in multiple calls) and the new `--mode' option is used to identify what standard to interpret them in (image or WCS). Together, these replace the old `--xcol', `--ycol', `--racol' and `--deccol'.
- MakeProfiles: The new `--crpix', `--crval' and `--cdelt' options now accept multiple values separated by a comma. So they replace the old `--crpix1', `--crpix2', `--crval1', `--crval2' and `--resolution' options.
- `gal_data_free_contents': when the input `gal_data_t' is a tile, its `array' element will not be freed. This enables safe usage of this function (and thus `gal_data_free') on tiles without worrying about the memory block associated with the tile.
- `gal_box_bound_ellipse' is the new name for the old `gal_box_ellipse_in_box' (to be more clear and avoid repetition of the term `box'). The input position angle is now also in degrees, not radians.
- `gal_box_overlap' now works on data of any dimensionality and thus also needs the number of dimensions (elements in each input array).
- `gal_box_border_from_center' now accepts an array of coordinates as one argument and the number of dimensions as another. This allows it to work on any dimensionality.
- `gal_fits_img_info' now also returns the name and units of the dataset (if they aren't NULL). So it takes two extra arguments.
- `gal_wcs_pixel_scale' now replaces the old `gal_wcs_pixel_scale_deg', since it doesn't only apply to degrees. The pixel scale units are defined by the units of the WCS.
- `GAL_TILE_PARSE_OPERATE' (only when `OTHER' is given) can now parse and operate on different datasets independent of the size of allocated block of memory (the tile sizes of `IN' and `OTHER' have to be identical, but not their allocated blocks of memory). Until now, it was necessary for the two blocks to have the same size and this is no longer the case.
Bug fixes
- MakeProfiles long options on 32bit big endian systems (bug #51341).
- Pure rotation around pixel coordinate (0,0) (bug #51353).
- NoiseChisel segfault when no usable region for sky clumps (bug #51372).
- Pixel scale measurement when dimension scale isn't equal or doesn't decrease (bug #51385).
- Improper types for function code in MakeProfiles (bug #51467).
- Crashes on 32-bit and big-endian systems (bug #51476).
- Warp's align matrix when second dimension must be reversed (bug #51536).
- Reading BZERO for unsigned 64-bit integers (bug #51555).
- Arithmetic with one file and no operators (bug #51559).
- NoiseChisel segfault when detection contains no clumps (bug #51906).
Checking integrity
Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify gnuastro-0.4.tar.gz.sig
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 16A8A4B2AEC42AFF
and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
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