Gnuastro 0.15.54 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

I hope you enjoyed the summer holidays. In my case, I used this
opportunity to move to Teruel (Spain), and start my new research
position at CEFCA (Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón) :-).

I am happy to say that we are almost ready for the next stable release
of Gnuastro and in that spirit, I am making this alpha-release for
version 0.15.54 (54 Git commits after version 0.15). It would be great
if you can try building and using this version to inform us if there
is any compilation warning or crash, or unexpected, wrong or degraded
behavior during your normal operation. In this way, we can have a
smooth Gnuastro 0.16 release for everyone (in about two weeks).

The full list of updates since version 0.15 are available in [1]
below. As you see there this release is mainly a bug-fix release,
thanks to the feedback from the growing Gnuastro community. But I am
happy to say that a lot of very exciting work is going on behind the
scenes (in development branches that aren't yet merged): thanks to the
two Google Summer of Code grants we got last year and this year the
works of Sachin Kumar Singh and Natáli Anzanello are almost concluding
and hopefully by version 0.17, Gnuastro will have astrometry! On the
other hand, Pedram Ashofte Ardakani is working hard to add non-linear
warping (and in particular WCS distortions, similar to what SWARP
does) to the Warp program. Hopefully that will be out by version 0.17
also. Please get in touch if you would like to try them out early and
share your feedback.

Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this
release. To decompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity
of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig) see [3]:

https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz (3.6 MB)
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz.sig (833 MB)

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed). Just note that the
SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding
that most checksum tools default to.

1467db642d7e6af4db42cc6baadda4deb01fb3b0  gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz
ouLMGhwQzW6r6dDYpKPtCZtCK+jF2w5OMSTO2YF4H/A  gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz

I am very grateful to Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani, Raul Infante-Sainz,
Natáli Anzanello and Zahra Sharbaf for directly contributing to the
source code of this release. Also, I should really thank Alejandro
Serrano Borlaff, Fernando Buitrago, Mark Calabretta, Zohreh Ghaffari,
Leslie Hunt, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Matthias Kluge, Juan Miro, Juan
Molina Tobar, Zahra Sharbaf, Vincenzo Testa, Ignacio Trujillo and
Aaron Watkins for their great suggestions for improvement and reported
bugs that have now been implemented in Gnuastro.

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs
you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued
work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so.

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.8
  Autoconf 2.71
  Automake 1.16.4
  Help2man 1.48.5
  ImageMagick 7.1.0-8
  Gnulib v0.1-4937-g9aca7b673
  Autoconf archives v2021.02.19-29-g0fbee2a

The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system
are described here:
  https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad
--
Tenure track researcher,
Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA),
Plaza San Juan 1, Planta 2
Teruel 44001, Spain





[1] Noteworthy changes in Gnuastro since version 0.15

** New features

  Book:
   - New section added to ConvertType's documentation for annotating the
     PDF output images with coordinates on the edges of the images, or
     tangential size at certain redshift. This is done using the PGFPlots
     package of LaTeX, directly with the same fonts and graphical settings
     as your paper/slide, while being in vector graphics quality, and not
     requiring hundreds of dependencies (only LaTeX is necessary beyond
     Gnuastro).
   - New section to describe the precedence of Table operators in one call
     to Table. Since the number of operations on table columns/rows has
     greatly increased in the last few versions, knowing this precedence
     can minimize the number of calls to Table.
   - The section on reverse polish notation (used in Arithmetic, for
     images, and column arithmetic in Table) has been edited and extended
     to be more useful for a new user.

  Arithmetic:
   - New operands (also available in Table's column arithmetic):
     - box-around-ellipse: width and height of the box covering an ellipse.

  CosmicCalculator:
   - A warning is printed if the requested redshift is lower than 0.007
     (corresponding to ~30Mpc in Plank 2018 cosmology). Because at these
     scales the peculiar velocity of galaxies may be significant compared
     to the Hubble flow (which is the basis of the calculations here). The
     warning can be suppressed with the '--quiet' option.

  MakeCatalog:
   --areaerror: spatial resolution of image specified by user, used in
     estimating the surface brightness error.
   --sberror: error in measuring the surface brightness (mag/arcsec^2).

  MakeProfiles:
   - New type of profile showing the azimuthal angle (in degrees, along the
     elliptical circumference of fixed radius) of each pixel. In
     combination with the radial distance profile, you can now create
     complex features in polar coordinates, such as tidal tails or tidal
     shocks (using the Arithmetic program to mix the radius and azimuthal
     angle through a function to create your desired features). Implemented
     after discussions with Fernando Buitrago and Matthias Kluge.

  Match:
   - When called with '--notmatched --outcols=AAA,BBB', Match will append
     non-matching rows of second table into first table's rows (for columns
     'AAA' and 'BBB' in example above, which are assumed to exist in both
     inputs, with same numeric datatype). This allows easy/clean merging of
     two catalogs that may have matching objects into one catalog without
     repetition. See description of '--outcols' in the Match manual for
     more. This feature was proposed by Juan Molina Tobar and Leslie Hunt.

  Sort-by-night (installed script)
   --stdintimeout: new option to set internal delay time for input from
     pipes (standard input). This is not for inputs to the script (which
     should always be files), but for the script's internal pipes.

  Statistics:
   --quantofmean: the quantile of the mean of the input dataset. this is a
     very good statistic to measure skewness in a distribution, see the
     description of this option in the book for more.

  Library:
   - Arithmetic macros:
     - GAL_ARITHMETIC_OP_BOX_AROUND_ELLIPSE
   - gal_wcs_write_wcsstr: wrapper of wcshdo of WCSLIB to simplify generic
     access to that low-level operation (has some extra sanity checks).

** Removed features

  Nothing was removed in this release.

** Changed features

  All programs:
   --stdintimeout: default value changed from 0.1 seconds to 1.5 seconds to
     avoid too many crashes when command before the pipe takes longer (thus
     needing a manual change of this value).

  MakeProfiles:
   - The default output suffix (when no '--output' is given) is now
     '_profiles.fits'. Until now, when no output name was given,
     MakeProfiles just replaced the suffix with '.fits' (effectively
     assuming the input is a plain-text file). As a result, if the input
     catalog was a FITS file, it would be automatically written-over
     (causing an error: bug #60989).

  Match:
   - The two '--notmatched' and '--outcols' can be called together (to
     create a single catalog that appends the non-matching rows of second
     table with the rows of the first. Until this version, this would cause
     an error.

  Table
   - Column concatenation (adding columns from other files) is now done
     before all row selection or row re-ording operations (if
     called). Until now, adding columns from other files was done after all
     row selection or re-ordering, but this was not too practically useful.

  Library
   - gal_fits_key_write_filename: now has 'quiet' argument to avoid
     printing a warning.

** Bugs fixed
  bug #60725: MakeCatalog doesn't put comment on --halfsumsb column.
  bug #60776: Radial profile script not using standard deviation image,
              fixed by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60778: Brightness error not NaN when all STD pixels are blank,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60826: Arithmetic won't delete existing file with tofile operators.
  bug #60881: Query segmentation fault when NED is called without a 
dataset.
  bug #60901: sort-by-night crash during make check due to stdintimeout,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60903: Increasing value of stdintimeout not effective beyond 
1000000,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60909: WCS coordinate conversion not working with TPV distortion,
              fixed with the help of Mark Calabretta.
  bug #60923: Standard deviation calculation giving NaN values due to
              floating point errors, found and fixed by Natáli Anzanello.
  bug #60958: Warning on long filename not written in FITS keyword printed
              even when '--quiet' is called, found by Raúl Infante-Sainz.
  bug #60989: MakeProfiles deletes input fits catalog when no output name
              specified.
  bug #60999: No content check when plain-text table doesn't have metadata.
  bug #61007: Crash due to CFITSIO 4.0.0 version format change, reported by
              Vincenzo Testa and Zohreh Ghaffari.
  bug #61108: Plain text table metadata ignored when numeric data type was
              not understood, reported by Sepideh Eskandarlou.





[2] Lzip has better compression ratio and archival features compared
to the `.gz' or `.xz' formats. Therefore Gnuastro's alpha/test
releases are only in this format, but for historical reasons we also
include `.gz' tarballs in the official releases. If you don't have
Lzip (you can check with `lzip --version' command), download and
install it from its webpage:

  https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html

If Lzip is present and you use GNU Tar, then the single command below
should uncompress and un-pack the tarball:

  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz

If the command above doesn't work, you have to un-compress and un-pack
it with two separate commands (or use a pipe to feed the output of the
first into the second: `lzip -cd gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz | tar -xf -'):

  $ lzip -d gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.15.54-4846.tar





[3] 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-0.15.54-4846.tar.lz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 71E899012D174B66

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.