[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro (new GNU project) released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the first public release of the GNU Astronomy
Utilities (Gnuastro, version 0.1). Gnuastro is an official GNU package
consisting of a set of utilities, or executable programs (listed
below), for astronomical data manipulation and analysis directly from
the command-line (no mini-environment) and satisfying the GNU Coding
Standards. The official Gnuastro webpage is available at:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/

An important component of Gnuastro is its comprehensive book
(documentation or manual, link below), which is available in various
online browsing (HTML), print, and command-line formats at:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/

The Gnuastro book thoroughly explains each utility's invocation
details (invocation examples, options, inputs and outputs). In
addition, following in the footsteps of the rich tradition of GNU
documentation, the book complements the technical details with
context, suggestions on best practices and even historical and
mathematical derivations (where necessary) to help new astronomers, or
new GNU/Linux users, understand and thus use the methods and tools
most effectively.

The "Tutorials" chapter has some easy to read (and hopefully
entertaining!) tutorials to get you started. Section 2.2 ("Sufi
simulates a detection") is completely self-sufficient (needs no input
files and catalogs) and can be done immediately after installation:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Tutorials.html

This release contains the following utilities (the executable names,
to be run on the command-line after installation, are in parenthesis).

  - Arithmetic (astarithmetic): For arithmetic operations on multiple
    (theoretically unlimited) number of data sets (images). It has a
    large and growing set of arithmetic, mathematical, and even
    statistical operators (for example +, -, *, /, sqrt, log, min,
    average, median).

  - ConvertType (astconvertt): Convert astronomical data files (FITS
    or IMH) to and from several other standard image and data formats,
    for example TXT, JPEG, EPS or PDF.

  - Convolve (astconvolve): Convolve (blur or smooth) data with a
    given kernel in spatial and frequency domain on multiple
    threads. Convolve can also do de-convolution to find the
    appropriate kernel to PSF-match two images.

  - CosmicCalculator (astconvolve): Do cosmological calculations, for
    example the luminosity distance, distance modulus, comoving volume
    among others.

  - Header (astheader): Print and manipulate the header data of a FITS
    file.

  - ImageCrop (astimgcrop): Crop region(s) from an image and stitch
    several images if necessary.  Inputs can be in pixel coordinates
    or world coordinates.

  - ImageStatistics (astimgstat): Get pixel statistics and save
    histogram and cumulative frequency plots.

  - ImageWarp (astimgwarp): Warp image to new pixel grid. Any
    projective transformation or Homography can be applied to the
    input images.

  - MakeCatalog (astmkcatalog): Make catalog of labeled image (output
    of NoiseChisel). The catalogs are highly customizable and adding
    new calculations/columns is very straightforward.

  - MakeNoise (astmknoise): Make (add) noise to an image, with a large
    set of random number generators (from GNU Scientific Library) and
    any seed.

  - MakeProfiles (astmkprof): Make mock 2D profiles in an image. The
    central regions of radial profiles are made with a configurable 2D
    Monte Carlo integration. It can also build the profiles on an
    over-sampled image.

  - NoiseChisel (astnoisechisel): Detect and segment signal in
    noise. It uses a technique to detect very faint and diffuse,
    irregularly shaped signal in noise (galaxies in the sky), using
    thresholds that are below the Sky value (see arXiv:1505.01664).

  - SubtractSky (astsubtractsky): Find and subtract sky value by
    comparing the mode and median on a mesh grid.

Gnuastro has effectively used the GNU Build System (see bootstrapping
tools below) to create a robust and clean infra-structure to glue the
utilities and (currently) internal libraries in one whole package
which is greater than the sum of its parts. This allows easy additions
of new utilities, options to existing utilities, and libraries in a
portable manner (usable in a wide variety of Unix-like operating
systems). The next release will hopefully include installed libraries.

Contributions from anyone interested are most welcome. To facilitate
and encourage your contribution, the "Developing" chapter of the book
thoroughly discusses the design philosophy, the project webpage on
Savannah, source code structure, coding conventions along with
guidelines and a tutorial on the version controlled (using Git)
workflow.

Gnuastro 0.1 has greatly benefited from the contributions of Mosè
Giordano and I am most grateful to him.

Gnuastro 0.1 was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Texinfo 6.1
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15
  Libtool 2.4.6
  Help2man 1.47.3
  Gnulib v0.1-784-gb117e55
  GNU Autoconf Archives v2016.03.20-33-g69d39ff

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro//gnuastro-0.1.tar.gz
  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro//gnuastro-0.1.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
or
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnuastro

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

ee4919a24efc2aca89379d36a108ae85  gnuastro-0.1.tar.gz
88bba7b97f39fe70ce761e9a81f0f80ed7718ae4  gnuastro-0.1.tar.gz


[*] 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-0.1.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 BBE395F8

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Best regards,
Mohammad