[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro 0.2 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the second release of GNU Astronomy Utilities
(Gnuastro).

Gnuastro is a collection of programs and a library functions for
astronomical data manipulation and analysis. The programs are run directory
on the command-line, enabling easy and efficient operation, combined with
other installed programs in shell scripts or Makefiles. The libraries are
also usable in C and C++ programs.

For the main changes in this version can be seen in the NEWS file which is
also distributed with this announcement in [1] (below). The most notable
new features are:

 - Gnuastro library: to use the building blocks of Gnuastro's programs in
   other C and C++ programs. Python wrappers will also be coming with the
   next releases. In this release (first library release), the main
   emphasis was on having a robust library build, management, and
   documentation infra-structure, rather than the actual functions. A lot
   of work still remains on improving the functions. Most of the
   interesting functions are also still locked up in the programs. But with
   this infra-structure in place, the next releases will greatly improve
   the quantity and quality of the offered library functions.

 - A new program to read and write FITS binary and ASCII tables called
   `Table' with the executable name `asttable'. It can also show the column
   information of a FITS table, or select columns with regular expressions
   on their title.

Here are the compressed sources:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.2.tar.gz   (4.0MB)
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.2.tar.lz   (2.7MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures, see [2] (below):
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.2.tar.gz.sig
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.2.tar.lz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnuastro
or
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
(Note that mirrors will need some time to synchronize with the main server)

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the tarballs.

175ee211b20d6a667a7186f564b5cc79  gnuastro-0.2.tar.gz
2f68cead777e4a6d38d1bccb7c200362  gnuastro-0.2.tar.lz
703918a2f180e3c448c66fc6e8180f40a15bb460  gnuastro-0.2.tar.gz
fbfd3eccf0fc15f49cb25b30ffa5dc95a74d30fc  gnuastro-0.2.tar.lz

Mosè Giordano and Vladimir Markelov contributed to the code in this
release. I am also very grateful to Alan Lefor, Yahya Sefidbakht, and
Mohammad-reza Khellat for their many patient tests during development along
with useful comments and suggestions.

Gnuastro 0.2 tarball was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Texinfo 6.1
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15
  Libtool 2.4.6
  Help2man 1.47.3
  Gnulib v0.1-898-ge63f5eb
  Autoconf Archives v2016.09.16-8-g8a6b028
Note that these are not installation dependencies, for those, please see
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Cheers,
Mohammad Akhlaghi

--
Postdoctoral research fellow
CRAL (Lyon Observatory), France.





[1]
* Noteworthy changes in release 0.2 (library 0.0.0) (2016-10-03) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  Linker errors on some operating systems have been fixed (bug #48076).

  Several memory allocation, checks or redundancies have been fixed: bugs
  #48453, #48516, #48603, #48611, #48571, #48650, #48657, #48692, #48770,
  #47866, #48899, #49049, #49007.

  ImageCrop no longer crashes with very long output file names (bugs #46241
  and #45380).

** New programs or headers

  Table: a new utility to read and write FITS binary and ASCII tables. It
  can also print the column information or select columns using regular
  expressions (task #13579).

  Shared libraries and headers are now installed. The libraries can be used
  in C and C++ programs. This release includes the following headers:
  `gnuastro.h', `array.h', `box.h', `fits.h', `linkedlist.h', `mesh.h',
  `polygon.h', `qsort.h', `spatialconvolve.h', `statistics.h', `threads.h',
  `wcs.h', `txtarray.h' (task #13765).

  Gnuastro now comes with a script in its top source directory
  (`tmpfs-config-make') to configure and build it in the tmpfs (on the
  RAM), for those systems that have it. See the new "Configure and build in
  RAM" section in the book for more (task #14100).

** New features

  MakeProfiles also accepts WCS positions (task #13566).

  Flat profiles in MakeProfiles can be given a profile specific value. The
  new `--mforflatpix' option MakeProfile will use the value in the
  magnitude column as a fixed value for each pixel. This can be very useful
  in defining a mask, or creating segmentation maps or labeled images (task
  #14115).

  MakeProfiles can now use input image as canvas. Instead of specifying the
  WSC and image size paramteres manually. With the new `--inputascanvas'
  option, MakeProfiles will get this information (along with blank pixels)
  from an already existing image (task #14116).

  Type of output in MakeProfiles and Arithmetic can be specified with the
  `--type' option.

  Magnitude error column in MakeCatalog with the `--magnitudeerr' option.

  Arithmetic now has new conditional (task #13870) and logical operators
  (task #14153) along with an operator for actions only when conditions are
  true: `where'. The new `isblank' operator will also enable you to select
  blank, or masked, pixels (task #14146).

  The `--noerodequant' in NoiseChisel enables it to detect small and
  sharper profiles by disabling erosion on pixels above a certain quantile
  (task #14139).

  MakeCatalog can also calculate the upper limit magnitude for each given
  object in the image by randomly positioning the object's footprint over
  undetected regions of the image (task #14167).

  The source tarball is now also distributed with Lzip for a much better
  compression ratio and more robust archival file format.

** Changes in behavior

  The two MakeProfiles options `--setconsttonan', `--setconsttomin' have
  been removed (see `--mforflatpix' above for their alternative).

  MakeCatalog makes clump catalog only when asked (when the `WCLUMPS'
  header exists in the objects HDU). This can be very useful in cases like
  aperture photometry, when the object labels are not generated by
  NoiseChisel and so a clump image doesn't exist (task #14122).

  Default cosmological parameters in CosmiCalculator set to Plank 2015
  results: A&A (2016), 594, A13 (arXiv 1502.01589).

  The `--envseed' option (to read random number generator type and seed
  from the environment) to MakeProfiles and MakeNoise can also be given in
  the configuration files.





[2]
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 (similar for `tar.lz'
files):

  gpg --verify gnuastro-0.2.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.