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0.4 (unreleased)

New Features

  • astropy.config
  • astropy.constants
    • Added b_wien to represent Wien wavelength displacement law constant. [#2194]
  • astropy.convolution
    • Changed the input parameter in Gaussian1DKernel and Gaussian2DKernel from width to stddev [#2085].
  • astropy.coordinates
    • The coordinates package has undergone major changes to implement APE5 . These include backwards-incompatible changes, as the underlying framework has changed substantially. See the APE5 text and the package documentation for more details. [#2422]
    • A position_angle method has been added to the new SkyCoord. [#2487]
    • Updated Angle.dms and Angle.hms to return namedtuple -s instead of regular tuples, and added Angle.signed_dms attribute that gives the absolute value of the d, m, and s along with the sign. [#1988]
    • By default, Distance objects are now required to be positive. To allow negative values, set allow_negative=True in the Distance constructor when creating a Distance instance.
    • Longitude (resp. Latitude) objects cannot be used any more to initialize or set Latitude (resp. Longitude) objects. An explicit conversion to Angle is now required. [#2461]
    • The deprecated functions for pre-0.3 coordinate object names like ICRSCoordinates have been removed. [#2422]
    • The rotation_matrix and angle_axis functions in astropy.coordinates.angles were made more numerically consistent and are now tested explicitly [#2619]
  • astropy.cosmology
    • Added z_at_value function to find the redshift at which a cosmology function matches a desired value. [#1909]
    • Added FLRW.differential_comoving_volume method to give the differential comoving volume at redshift z. [#2103]
    • The functional interface is now deprecated in favor of the more-explicit use of methods on cosmology objects. [#2343]
    • Updated documentation to reflect the removal of the functional interface. [#2507]
  • astropy.io.ascii
    • The astropy.io.ascii output formats latex and aastex accept a dictionary called latex_dict to specify options for LaTeX output. It is now possible to specify the table alignment within the text via the tablealign keyword. [#1838]
    • If header_start is specified in a call to ascii.get_reader or any method that calls get_reader (e.g. ascii.read) but data_start is not specified at the same time, then data_start is calculated so that the data starts after the header. Before this, the default was that the header line was read again as the first data line [#855 and #1844].
    • A new csv format was added as a convenience for handling CSV (comma- separated values) data. [#1935] This format also recognises rows with an inconsistent number of elements. [#1562]
    • An option was added to guess the start of data for CDS format files when they do not strictly conform to the format standard. [#2241]
    • Added an HTML reader and writer to the astropy.io.ascii package. Parsing requires the installation of BeautifulSoup and is therefore an optional feature. [#2160]
    • Added support for inputting column descriptions and column units with the io.ascii.SExtractor reader. [#2372]
    • Allow the use of non-local ReadMe files in the CDS reader. [#2329]
    • Provide a mechanism to select how masked values are printed. [#2424]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Included a new command-line script called fitsheader to display the header(s) of a FITS file from the command line. [#2092]
    • Added new verification options fix+ignore, fix+warn, fix+exception, silentfix+ignore, silentfix+warn, and silentfix+exception which give more control over how to report fixable errors as opposed to unfixable errors.
  • astropy.io.misc
  • astropy.io.registry
  • astropy.io.votable
  • astropy.modeling
    • Prototype implementation of fitters that treat optimization algorithms separately from fit statistics, allowing new fitters to be created by mixing and matching optimizers and statistic functions. [#1914]
    • Added a new SimplexLSQFitter which uses a downhill simplex optimizer with a least squares statistic. [#1914]
    • Changed Gaussian2D model such that theta now increases counterclockwise. [#2199]
    • Replaced the MatrixRotation2D model with a new model called simply Rotation2D which requires only an angle to specify the rotation. The new Rotation2D rotates in a counter-clockwise sense whereas the old MatrixRotation2D increased the angle clockwise. [#2266, #2269]
    • Added a new AffineTransformation2D model which serves as a replacement for the capability of MatrixRotation2D to accept an arbitrary matrix, while also adding a translation capability. [#2269]
    • Added GaussianAbsorption1D model. [#2215]
    • New Redshift model [#2176].
  • astropy.nddata
    • Allow initialization NDData or StdDevUncertainty with a Quantity. [#2380]
  • astropy.stats
    • Added flat prior to binom_conf_interval and binned_binom_proportion
  • astropy.sphinx
    • The automodapi and automodsumm extensions now include sphinx configuration options to write out what automodapi and automodsumm generate, mainly for debugging purposes. [#1975, #2022]
    • Reference documentation now shows functions/class docstrings at the inteded user-facing API location rather than the actual file where the implementation is found. [#1826]
    • The automodsumm extension configuration was changed to generate documentation of class __call__ member functions. [#1817, #2135]
    • automodapi and automodsumm now have an :allowed-package-names: option that make it possible to document functions and classes that are in a different namespace. [#2370]
  • astropy.table
    • Improved grouped table aggregation by using the numpy reduceat() method when possible. This can speed up the operation by a factor of at least 10 to 100 for large unmasked tables and columns with relatively small group sizes. [#2625]
    • Allow row-oriented data input using a new rows keyword argument. [#850]
    • Allow subclassing of Table and the component classes Row, Column, MaskedColumn, TableColumns, and TableFormatter. [#2287]
    • Fix to allow numpy integer types as valid indices into tables in Python 3.x [#2477]
    • Remove transition code related to the order change in Column and MaskedColumn arguments name and data from Astropy 0.2 to 0.3. [#2511]
    • Change HTML table representation in IPython notebook to show all table columns instead of restricting to 80 column width. [#2651]
  • astropy.time
    • Mean and apparent sidereal time can now be calculated using the sidereal_time method [#1418].
    • The time scale now defaults to UTC if no scale is provided. [#2091]
    • TimeDelta objects can have all scales but UTC, as well as, for consistency with time-like quantities, undefined scale (where the scale is taken from the object one adds to or subtracts from). This allows, e.g., to work consistently in TDB. [#1932]
    • Time now supports ISO format strings that end in "Z". [#2211, #2203]
  • astropy.units
    • Support for the unit format Office of Guest Investigator Programs (OGIP) FITS files has been added. [#377]
    • The spectral equivalency can now handle angular wave number. [#1306 and #1899]
    • Added one as a shorthand for dimensionless_unscaled. [#1980]
    • Added dex and dB units. [#1628]
    • Added temperature() equivalencies to support conversion between Kelvin, Celsius, and Fahrenheit. [#2209]
    • Added temperature_energy() equivalencies to support conversion between electron-volt and Kelvin. [#2637]
    • The runtime of astropy.units.Unit.compose is greatly improved (by a factor of 2 in most cases) [#2544]
    • Added electron unit. [#2599]
  • astropy.utils
    • timer.RunTimePredictor now uses astropy.modeling in its do_fit() method. [#1896]
  • astropy.vo
    • A new sub-package, astropy.vo.samp, is now available (this was previously the SAMPy package, which has been refactored for use in Astropy). [#1907]
    • Enhanced functionalities for VOSCatalog and VOSDatabase. [#1206]
  • astropy.wcs
    • astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23 or later. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.
    • Bounds checking is now performed on native spherical coordinates. Any out-of-bounds values will be returned as NaN, and marked in the stat array, if using the low-level wcslib interface such as astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.p2s. [#2107]
    • A new method, astropy.wcs.WCS.compare(), compares two wcsprm structs for equality with varying degrees of strictness. [#2361]
    • New astropy.wcs.utils module, with a handful of tools for manipulating WCS objects, including dropping, swapping, and adding axes.

API Changes

  • astropy.config

    • The configuration system received a major overhaul, as part of APE3. It is no longer possible to save configuration items from Python, but instead users must edit the configuration file directly. The locations of configuration items have moved, and some have been changed to science state values. The old locations should continue to work until astropy 0.5, but deprecation warnings will be displayed. See :ref:`config-0-4-transition` for a detailed description of the changes and how to update existing code. [#2094]

  • astropy.constants

  • astropy.convolution

  • astropy.coordinates

  • astropy.cosmology

  • astropy.io.ascii

  • astropy.io.fits

    • The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is now fully deprecated (though will not be removed for a long time, considering how widely it is used).

      Instead please use the more explicit BinTableHDU.from_columns to create a new binary table HDU, and the similar TableHDU.from_columns to create a new ASCII table. These otherwise accept the same arguments as new_table which is now just a wrapper for these.

    • The .fromstring classmethod of each HDU type has been simplified such that, true to its namesake, it only initializes an HDU from a string containing its header and data.

    • Fixed an issue where header wildcard matching (for example header['DATE*']) can be used to match any characters that might appear in a keyword. Previously this only matched keywords containing characters in the set [0-9A-Za-z_]. Now this can also match a hyphen - and any other characters, as some conventions like HIERARCH and record-valued keyword cards allow a wider range of valid characters than standard FITS keywords.

    • This will be the last release to support the following APIs that have been marked deprecated since Astropy v0.1/PyFITS v3.1:

      • The CardList class, which was part of the old header implementation.
      • The Card.key attribute. Use Card.keyword instead.
      • The Card.cardimage and Card.ascardimage attributes. Use simply Card.image or str(card) instead.
      • The create_card factory function. Simply use the normal Card constructor instead.
      • The create_card_from_string factory function. Use Card.fromstring instead.
      • The upper_key function. Use Card.normalize_keyword method instead (this is not unlikely to be used outside of PyFITS itself, but it was technically public API).
      • The usage of Header.update with Header.update(keyword, value, comment) arguments. Header.update should only be used analogously to dict.update. Use Header.set instead.
      • The Header.ascard attribute. Use Header.cards instead for a list of all the Card objects in the header.
      • The Header.rename_key method. Use Header.rename_keyword instead.
      • The Header.get_history method. Use header['HISTORY'] instead (normal keyword lookup).
      • The Header.get_comment method. Use header['COMMENT'] instead.
      • The Header.toTxtFile method. Use header.totextfile instead.
      • The Header.fromTxtFile method. Use Header.fromtextfile instead.
      • The tdump and tcreate functions. Use tabledump and tableload respectively.
      • The BinTableHDU.tdump and tcreate methods. Use BinTableHDU.dump and BinTableHDU.load respectively.
      • The txtfile argument to the Header constructor. Use Header.fromfile instead.
      • The startColumn and endColumn arguments to the FITS_record constructor. These are unlikely to be used by any user code.

      These deprecated interfaces will be removed from the development version of Astropy following the v0.4 release (they will still be available in any v0.4.x bugfix releases, however).

  • astropy.io.misc

  • astropy.io.registry

  • astropy.io.votable

  • astropy.modeling

    • The method computing the derivative of the model with respect to parameters was renamed from deriv to fit_deriv. [#1739]

    • ParametricModel and the associated Parametric1DModel and Parametric2DModel classes have been renamed FittableModel, Fittable1DModel, and Fittable2DModel respectively. The base Model class has subsumed the functionality of the old

      ParametricModel class so that all models support parameter constraints. The only distinction of FittableModel is that anything which subclasses it is assumed "safe" to use with Astropy fitters. [#2276]

    • NonLinearLSQFitter has been renamed LevMarLSQFitter to emphasise that it uses the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

    • The SLSQPFitter class has been renamed SLSQPLSQFitter to emphasize that it uses the Sequential Least Squares Programming optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

    • The Fitter.errorfunc method has been renamed to the more general Fitter.objective_function. [#1914]

  • astropy.nddata

    • Issue warning if unit is changed from a non-trivial value by directly setting NDData.unit. [#2411]
    • The mask and flag attributes of astropy.nddata.NDData can now be set with any array-like object instead of requiring that they be set with a numpy.ndarray. [#2419]

  • astropy.stats

  • astropy.table

    • The default table printing function now shows a table header row for units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#1282]
    • Before, an unmasked Table was automatically converted to a masked table if generated from a masked Table or a MaskedColumn. Now, this conversion is only done if explicitly requested or if any of the input values is actually masked. [#1185]
    • The repr() function of astropy.table.Table now shows the units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#2180]

  • astropy.time

    • Correct use of UT in TDB calculation [#1938, #1939].
    • TimeDelta objects can have scales other than TAI [#1932].
    • Location information should now be passed on via an EarthLocation instance or anything that initialises it, e.g., a tuple containing either geocentric or geodetic coordinates. [#1928]

  • astropy.units

    • Quantity now converts input to float by default, as this is physically most sensible for nearly all units [#1776].
    • Quantity comparisons with == or != now always return True or False, even if units do not match (for which case a UnitsError used to be raised). [#2328]
    • Applying float or int to a Quantity now works for all dimensionless quantities; they are automatically converted to unscaled dimensionless. [#2249]
    • The exception astropy.units.UnitException, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use astropy.units.UnitError instead [#2386]
    • Initializing a Quantity with a valid number/array with a unit attribute now interprets that attribute as the units of the input value. This makes it possible to initialize a Quantity from an ~astropy.table.Table column and have it correctly pick up the units from the column. [#2486]

  • astropy.utils

  • astropy.vo

  • astropy.wcs

    • calcFootprint was deprecated. It is replaced by calc_footprint. An optional boolean keyword center was added to calc_footprint. It controls whether the centers or the corners of the pixels are used in the computation. [#2384]
    • astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_pix2foc and astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_foc2pix formerly did not conform to the SIP standard: CRPIX was added to the foc result so that it could be used as input to "core FITS WCS". As of astropy 0.4, CRPIX is no longer added to the result, so the foc space is correct as defined in the SIP convention. [#2360]
    • astropy.wcs.UnitConverter, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use the astropy.units module instead. [#2386]
    • The following methods on astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.1, have been removed [#2386]:
      • all_pix2sky -> all_pix2world
      • wcs_pix2sky -> wcs_pix2world
      • wcs_sky2pix -> wcs_world2pix
    • The naxis1 and naxis2 attributes and the get_naxis method of astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.2, have been removed. Use the shape of the underlying FITS data array instead. [#2386]

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.config
  • astropy.constants
    • astropy.constants.Contant objects can now be deep copied. [#2601]
  • astropy.convolution
  • astropy.coordinates
  • astropy.cosmology
    • The distance modulus function in astropy.cosmology can now handle negative distances, which can occur in certain closed cosmologies. [#2008]
    • Removed accidental imports of some extraneous variables in astropy.cosmology [#2025]
  • astropy.io.ascii
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Use NaN for missing values in FITS when using Table.write for float columns. Earlier the default fill value was close to 1e20.[#2186]
    • Fixes for checksums on 32-bit platforms. Results may be different if writing or checking checksums in "nonstandard" mode. [#2484]
    • Additional minor bug fixes ported from PyFITS. [#2575]
  • astropy.io.misc
  • astropy.io.registry
  • astropy.io.votable
    • It is now possible to save an astropy.table.Table object as a VOTable with any of the supported data formats, tabledata, binary and binary2, by using the tabledata_format kwarg. [#2138]
    • Fixed a crash writing out variable length arrays. [#2577]
  • astropy.modeling
  • astropy.nddata
    • Indexing NDData in a way that results in a single element returns that element. [#2170]
    • Change construction of result of arithmetic and unit conversion to allow subclasses to require the presence of attribute like unit. [#2300]
    • Scale uncertainties to correct units in arithmetic operations and unit conversion. [#2393]
    • Ensure uncertainty and mask members are copied in arithmetic and convert_unit_to. [#2394]
    • Mask result of arithmetic if either of the operands is masked. [#2403]
    • Copy all attributes of input object if astropy.nddata.NDData is initialized with an NDData object. [#2406]
    • Copy flags to new object in convert_unit_to. [#2409]
    • Result of NDData arithmetic makes a copy of any WCS instead of using a reference. [#2410]
    • Fix unit handling for multiplication/division and use astropy.units.Quantity for units arithmetic. [#2413]
    • A masked NDData is now converted to a masked array when used in an operation or ufunc with a numpy array. [#2414]
    • An unmasked NDData now uses an internal representation of its mask state that numpy.ma expects so that an NDData behaves as an unmasked array. [#2417]
  • astropy.sphinx
    • Fix crash in smart resolver when the resolution doesn't work. [#2591]
  • astropy.stats
  • astropy.table
    • The astropy.table.Column object can now use both functions and callable objects as formats. [#2313]
    • Fixed a problem on 64 bit windows that caused errors "expected 'DTYPE_t' but got 'long long'" [#2490]
    • Fix initialisation of TableColumns with lists or tuples. [#2647]
  • astropy.time
    • Correct UT1->UTC->UT1 round-trip being off by 1 second if UT1 is on a leap second. [#2077]
  • astropy.units
    • Quantity.copy now behaves identically to ndarray.copy, and thus supports the order argument (for numpy >=1.6). [#2284]
    • Composing base units into identical composite units now works. [#2382]
    • Creating and composing/decomposing units is now substantially faster [#2544]
  • astropy.utils
  • astropy.vo
  • astropy.wcs
    • Astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23 or later. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.
    • Bug fixes in the projection routines: in hpxx2s [the cartesian-to-spherical operation of the HPX projection] relating to bounds checking, bug introduced at wcslib 4.20; in parx2s and molx2s`` [the cartesion-to-spherical operation of the PAR and MOL projections respectively] relating to setting the stat vector; in hpxx2s relating to implementation of the vector API; and in xphx2s relating to setting an out-of-bounds value of phi.
    • In the PCO projection, use alternative projection equations for greater numerical precision near theta == 0. In the COP projection, return an exact result for theta at the poles. Relaxed the tolerance for bounds checking a little in SFL projection.
    • Fix a bug allocating insufficient memory in astropy.wcs.WCS.sub [#2468]
    • A new method, Wcsprm.bounds_check (corresponding to wcslib's wcsbchk) has been added to control what bounds checking is performed by wcslib.
    • WCS.to_header will now raise a more meaningful exception when the WCS information is invalid or inconsistent in some way. [#1854]
    • In WCS.to_header, RESTFRQ and RESTWAV are no longer rewritten if zero. [#2468]
    • In WCS.to_header, floating point values will now always be written with an exponent or fractional part, i.e. .0 being appended if necessary to acheive this. [#2468]
    • If the C extension for astropy.wcs was not built or fails to import for any reason, import astropy.wcs will result in an ImportError, rather than getting obscure errors once the astropy.wcs is used. [#2061]
    • When the C extension for astropy.wcs is built using a version of wscslib already present in the system, the package does not try to install wcslib headers under astropy/wcs/include. [#2536]
    • Fixes an unresolved external symbol error in the astropy.wcs._wcs C extension on Microsoft Windows when built with a Microsoft compiler. [#2478]
  • Misc
    • Running the test suite with python setup.py test now works if the path to the source contains spaces. [#2488]
    • The version of ERFA included with Astropy is now v1.1.0 [#2497]
    • Removed deprecated option from travis configuration and force use of wheels rather than allowing build from source. [#2576]
    • The short option -n to run tests in parallel was broken (conflicts with the distutils built-in option of "dry-run"). Changed to -j. [#2566]

Other Changes and Additions

  • python setup.py test --coverage will now give more accurate results, because the coverage analysis will include early imports of astropy. There doesn't seem to be a way to get this to work when doing import astropy; astropy.test(), so the coverage keyword to astropy.test has been removed. Coverage testing now depends only on coverage.py, not pytest-cov. [#2112]
  • The included version of py.test has been upgraded to 2.5.1. [#1970]
  • The included version of six.py has been upgraded to 1.5.2. [#2006]
  • Where appropriate, tests are now run both with and without the unicode_literals option to ensure that we support both cases. [#1962]
  • A monkey patch is performed to fix a bug in Numpy version 1.7 and earlier where unicode fill values on masked arrays are not supported. This may cause unintended side effects if your application also monkey patches numpy.ma or relies on the broken behavior. If unicode support of masked arrays is important to your application, upgrade to Numpy 1.8 or later for best results. [#2059]
  • The developer documentation has been extensively rearranged and rewritten. [#1712]
  • The human_time function in astropy.utils now returns strings without zero padding. [#2420]
  • The bdist_dmg command for setup.py has now been removed. [#2553]
  • Many broken API links have been fixed in the documentation, and the nitpick Sphinx option is now used to avoid broken links in future. [#1221, #2019, #2109, #2161, #2162, #2192, #2200, #2296, #2448, #2456, #2460, #2467, #2476, #2508, #2509]

0.3.2 (2014-05-13)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.coordinates
    • if sep argument is specified to be a single character in sexagisimal_to_string, it now includes seperators only between items [#2183]
    • Ensure comparisons involving Distance objects do not raise exceptions; also ensure operations that lead to units other than length return Quantity. [#2206, #2250]
    • Multiplication and division of Angle objects is now supported. [#2273]
    • Fixed Angle.to_string functionality so that negative angles have the correct amount of padding when pad=True. [#2337]
    • Mixing strings and quantities in the Angle constructor now works. For example: Angle(['1d', 1. * u.d]). [#2398]
  • astropy.cosmology
    • Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]
    • Be more careful about converting to floating point internally [#1815, #1818]
  • astropy.io.ascii
    • The CDS reader in astropy.io.ascii can now handle multiple description lines in ReadMe files. [#2225]
    • When reading a table with values that generate an overflow error during type conversion (e.g. overflowing the native C long type), fall through to using string. Previously this generated an exception [#2234].
    • Some CDS files mark missing values with "---", others with "--". Recognize any string with one to four dashes as null value. [#1335]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Allow pickling of FITS_rec objects. [#1597]
    • Improved behavior when writing large compressed images on OSX by removing an unncessary check for platform architecture. [#2345]
    • Fixed an issue where Astropy Table objects containing boolean columns were not correctly written out to FITS files. [#1953]
    • Several other bug fixes ported from PyFITS v3.2.3 [#2368]
    • Fixed a crash on Python 2.x when writing a FITS file directly to a StringIO.StringIO object. [#2463]
  • astropy.io.registry
    • Allow readers/writers with the same name to be attached to different classes. [#2312]
  • astropy.io.votable
    • By default, floating point values are now written out using repr rather than str to preserve precision [#2137]
  • astropy.modeling
    • Fixed the SIP and InverseSIP models both so that they work in the first place, and so that they return results consistent with the SIP functions in astropy.wcs. [#2177]
  • astropy.stats
    • Ensure the axis keyword in astropy.stats.funcs can now be used for all axes. [#2173]
  • astropy.table
    • Ensure nameless columns can be printed, using 'None' for the header. [#2213]
  • astropy.time
    • Fixed pickling of Time objects. [#2123]
  • astropy.units
    • Quantity._repr_latex_() returns NotImplementedError for quantity arrays instead of an uninformative formatting exception. [#2258]
    • Ensure Quantity.flat always returns Quantity. [#2251]
    • Angstrom unit renders better in MathJax [#2286]
  • astropy.utils
    • Progress bars will now be displayed inside the IPython qtconsole. [#2230]
    • data.download_file() now evaluates REMOTE_TIMEOUT() at runtime rather than import time. Previously, setting REMOTE_TIMEOUT after import had no effect on the function's behavior. [#2302]
    • Progressbar will be limited to 100% so that the bar does not exceed the terminal width. The numerical display can still exceed 100%, however.
  • astropy.vo
    • Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]
    • Cone Search validation no longer raises ConeSearchError for positive RA. [#2240, #2242]
  • astropy.wcs
    • Fixed a bug where calling astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub with WCSSUB_CELESTIAL may cause memory corruption due to underallocation of a temporary buffer. [#2350]
    • Fixed a memory allocation bug in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub and astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.copy. [#2439]
  • Misc
    • Fixes for compatibility with Python 3.4. [#1945]
    • import astropy; astropy.test() now correctly uses the same test configuration as python setup.py test [#1811]

0.3.1 (2014-03-04)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.config

    • Fixed a bug where ConfigurationItem.set_temp() does not reset to default value when exception is raised within with block. [#2117]

  • astropy.convolution

    • Fixed a bug where _truncation was left undefined for CustomKernel. [#2016]
    • Fixed a bug with _normalization when CustomKernel input array sums to zero. [#2016]

  • astropy.coordinates

    • Fixed a bug where using == on two array coordinates wouldn't work. [#1832]
    • Fixed bug which caused len() not to work for coordinate objects and added a .shape property to get appropriately array-like behavior. [#1761, #2014]
    • Fixed a bug where sexagesimal notation would sometimes include exponential notation in the last field. [#1908, #1913]
    • CompositeStaticMatrixTransform no longer attempts to reference the undefined variable self.matrix during instantiation. [#1944]
    • Fixed pickling of Longitude, ensuring wrap_angle is preserved [#1961]
    • Allow sep argument in Angle.to_string to be empty (resulting in no separators) [#1989]

  • astropy.io.ascii

    • Allow passing unicode delimiters when reading or writing tables. The delimiter must be convertible to pure ASCII. [#1949]
    • Fix a problem when reading a table and renaming the columns to names that already exist. [#1991]

  • astropy.io.fits

  • astropy.io.misc

    • Fixed issues in the HDF5 Table reader/writer functions that occurred on Windows. [#2099]

  • astropy.io.votable

    • The write_null_values kwarg to VOTable.to_xml, when set to False (the default) would produce non-standard VOTable files. Therefore, this functionality has been replaced by a better understanding that knows which fields in a VOTable may be left empty (only char, float and double in VOTable 1.1 and 1.2, and all fields in VOTable 1.3). The kwarg is still accepted but it will be ignored, and a warning is emitted. [#1809]
    • Printing out a astropy.io.votable.tree.Table object using repr or str now uses the pretty formatting in astropy.table, so it's possible to easily preview the contents of a VOTable. [#1766]

  • astropy.modeling

    • Fixed bug in computation of model derivatives in LinearLSQFitter. [#1903]
    • Raise a NotImplementedError when fitting composite models. [#1915]
    • Fixed bug in the computation of the Gaussian2D model. [#2038]
    • Fixed bug in the computation of the AiryDisk2D model. [#2093]

  • astropy.sphinx

    • Added slightly more useful debug info for AstropyAutosummary. [#2024]

  • astropy.table

    • The column string representation for n-dimensional cells with only one element has been fixed. [#1522]
    • Fix a problem that caused MaskedColumn.__getitem__ to not preserve column metadata. [#1471, #1872]
    • With Numpy prior to version 1.6.2, tables with Unicode columns now sort correctly. [#1867]
    • astropy.table can now print out tables with Unicode columns containing non-ascii characters. [#1864]
    • Columns can now be named with Unicode strings, as long as they contain only ascii characters. This makes using astropy.table easier on Python 2 when from __future__ import unicode_literals is used. [#1864]
    • Allow pickling of Table, Column, and MaskedColumn objects. [#792]
    • Fix a problem where it was not possible to rename columns after sorting or adding a row. [#2039]

  • astropy.time

    • Fix a problem where scale conversion problem in TimeFromEpoch was not showing a useful error [#2046]
    • Fix a problem when converting to one of the formats unix, cxcsec, gps or plot_date when the time scale is UT1, TDB or TCB [#1732]
    • Ensure that delta_ut1_utc gets calculated when accessed directly, instead of failing and giving a rather obscure error message [#1925]
    • Fix a bug when computing the TDB to TT offset. The transform routine was using meters instead of kilometers for the Earth vector. [#1929]
    • Increase __array_priority__ so that TimeDelta can convert itself to a Quantity also in reverse operations [#1940]
    • Correct hop list from TCG to TDB to ensure that conversion is possible [#2074]

  • astropy.units

    • Quantity initialisation rewritten for speed [#1775]
    • Fixed minor string formatting issue for dimensionless quantities. [#1772]
    • Fix error for inplace operations on non-contiguous quantities [#1834].
    • The definition of the unit bar has been corrected to "1e5 Pascal" from "100 Pascal" [#1910]
    • For units that are close to known units, but not quite, for example due to differences in case, the exception will now include recommendations. [#1870]
    • The generic and FITS unit parsers now accept multiple slashes in the unit string. There are multiple ways to interpret them, but the approach taken here is to convert "m/s/kg" to "m s-1 kg-1". Multiple slashes are accepted, but discouraged, by the FITS standard, due to the ambiguity of parsing, so a warning is raised when it is encountered. [#1911]
    • The use of "angstrom" (with a lower case "a") is now accepted in FITS unit strings, since it is in common usage. However, since it is not officially part of the FITS standard, a warning will be issued when it is encountered. [#1911]
    • Pickling unrecognized units will not raise a AttributeError. [#2047]
    • astropy.units now correctly preserves the precision of fractional powers. [#2070]
    • If a Unit or Quantity is raised to a floating point power that is very close to a rational number with a denominator less than or equal to 10, it is converted to a Fraction object to preserve its precision through complex unit conversion operations. [#2070]

  • astropy.utils

    • Fixed crash in timer.RunTimePredictor.do_fit. [#1905]
    • Fixed astropy.utils.compat.argparse for Python 3.1. [#2017]

  • astropy.wcs

    • astropy.wcs.WCS, astropy.wcs.WCS.fix and astropy.wcs.find_all_wcs now have a translate_units keyword argument that is passed down to astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.fix. This can be used to specify any unsafe translations of units from rarely used ones to more commonly used ones.

      Although "S" is commonly used to represent seconds, its translation to "s" is potentially unsafe since the standard recognizes "S" formally as Siemens, however rarely that may be used. The same applies to "H" for hours (Henry), and "D" for days (Debye).

      When these sorts of changes are performed, a warning is emitted. [#1854]

    • When a unit is "fixed" by astropy.wcs.WCS.fix or astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.unitfix, it now correctly reports the CUNIT field that was changed. [#1854]

    • astropy.wcs.Wcs.printwcs will no longer warn that cdelt is being ignored when none was present in the FITS file. [#1845]

    • astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.set is called from within the astropy.wcs.WCS constructor, therefore any invalid information in the keywords will be raised from the constructor, rather than on a subsequent call to a transformation method. [#1918]

    • Fix a memory corruption bug when using astropy.wcs.Wcs.sub with astropy.wcs.WCSSUB_CELESTIAL. [#1960]

    • Fixed the AttributeError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.WCS.footprint_to_file. [#1912]

    • Fixed a NameError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

    • Fixed a bug where named WCSes may be erroneously reported as ' ' when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

    • Fixed a bug where error messages about incorrect header keywords may not be propagated correctly, resulting in a "NULL error object in wcslib" message. [#2106]

  • Misc

    • There are a number of improvements to make Astropy work better on big endian platforms, such as MIPS, PPC, s390x and SPARC. [#1849]
    • The test suite will now raise exceptions when a deprecated feature of Python or Numpy is used. [#1948]

Other Changes and Additions

  • A new function, astropy.wcs.get_include, has been added to get the location of the astropy.wcs C header files. [#1755]
  • The doctests in the .rst files in the docs folder are now tested along with the other unit tests. This is in addition to the testing of doctests in docstrings that was already being performed. See docs/development/testguide.rst for more information. [#1771]
  • Fix a problem where import fails on Python 3 if setup.py exists in current directory. [#1877]

0.3 (2013-11-20)

New Features

  • General

    • A top-level configuration item, unicode_output has been added to control whether the Unicode string representation of certain objects will contain Unicode characters. For example, when use_unicode is False (default):

      >>> from astropy import units as u
>>> print(unicode(u.degree))
deg

      When use_unicode is True:

      >>> from astropy import units as u
>>> print(unicode(u.degree))
°

      See handling-unicode for more information. [#1441]

      • astropy.utils.misc.find_api_page is now imported into the top-level. This allows usage like astropy.find_api_page(astropy.units.Quantity). [#1779]

  • astropy.convolution

    • New class-based system for generating kernels, replacing make_kernel. [#1255] The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution. [#1451]

  • astropy.coordinates

    • Two classes astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude have been added. These are derived from the new Angle class and used for all longitude-like (RA, azimuth, galactic L) and latitude-like coordinates (Dec, elevation, galactic B) respectively. The Longitude class provides auto-wrapping capability and Latitude performs bounds checking.
    • astropy.coordinates.Distance supports conversion to and from distance modulii. [#1472]
    • astropy.coordinates.SphericalCoordinateBase and derived classes now support arrays of coordinates, enabling large speed-ups for some operations on multiple coordinates at the same time. These coordinates can also be indexed using standard slicing or any Numpy-compatible indexing. [#1535, #1615]
    • Array coordinates can be matched to other array coordinates, finding the closest matches between the two sets of coordinates (see the astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_3d and astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_sky functions). [#1535]

  • astropy.cosmology

    • Added support for including massive Neutrinos in the cosmology classes. The Planck (2013) cosmology has been updated to use this. [#1364]
    • Calculations now use and return Quantity objects where appropriate. [#1237]

  • astropy.io.ascii

    • Added support for writing IPAC format tables [#1152].

  • astropy.io.fits

    • Added initial support for table columns containing pseudo-unsigned integers. This is currently enabled by using the uint=True option when opening files; any table columns with the correct BZERO value will be interpreted and returned as arrays of unsigned integers. [#906]
    • Upgraded vendored copy of CFITSIO to v3.35, though backwards compatibility back to version v3.28 is maintained.
    • Added support for reading and writing tables using the Q format for columns. The Q format is identical to the P format (variable-length arrays) except that it uses 64-bit integers for the data descriptors, allowing more than 4 GB of variable-length array data in a single table.
    • Some refactoring of the table and FITS_rec modules in order to better separate the details of the FITS binary and ASCII table data structures from the HDU data structures that encapsulate them. Most of these changes should not be apparent to users (but see API Changes below).

  • astropy.io.votable

    • Updated to support the VOTable 1.3 draft. [#433]
    • Added the ability to look up and group elements by their utype attribute. [#622]
    • The format of the units of a VOTable file can be specified using the unit_format parameter. Note that units are still always written out using the CDS format, to ensure compatibility with the standard.

  • astropy.modeling

    • Added a new framework for representing and evaluating mathematical models and for fitting data to models. See "What's New in Astropy 0.3" in the documentation for further details. [#493]

  • astropy.stats

    • Added robust statistics functions astropy.stats.funcs.median_absolute_deviation, astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_location, and astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_midvariance. [#621]
    • Added astropy.stats.funcs.signal_to_noise_oir_ccd for computing the signal to noise ratio for source being observed in the optical/IR using a CCD. [#870]
    • Add axis=int option to stropy.stats.funcs.sigma_clip to allow clipping along a given axis for multidimensional data. [#1083]

  • astropy.table

    • New columns can be added to a table via assignment to a non-existing column by name. [#726]
    • Added join function to perform a database-like join on two tables. This includes support for inner, left, right, and outer joins as well as metadata merging. [#903]
    • Added hstack and vstack functions to stack two or more tables. [#937]
    • Tables now have a .copy method and include support for copy and deepcopy. [#1208]
    • Added support for selecting and manipulating groups within a table with a database style group_by method. [#1424]
    • Table read and write functions now include rudimentary support reading and writing of FITS tables via the unified reading/writing interface. [#591]
    • The units and dtypes attributes and keyword arguments in Column, MaskedColumn, Row, and Table are now deprecated in favor of the single-tense unit and dtype. [#1174]
    • Setting a column from a Quantity now correctly sets the unit on the Column object. [#732]
    • Add remove_row and remove_rows to remove table rows. [#1230]
    • Added a new Table.show_in_browser method that opens a web browser and displays the table rendered as HTML. [#1342]
    • New tables can now be instantiated using a single row from an existing table. [#1417]

  • astropy.time

    • New Time objects can be instantiated from existing Time objects (but with different format, scale, etc.) [#889]
    • Added a Time.now classmethod that returns the current UTC time, similarly to Python's datetime.now. [#1061]
    • Update internal time manipulations so that arithmetic with Time and TimeDelta objects maintains sub-nanosecond precision over a time span longer than the age of the universe. [#1189]
    • Use astropy.utils.iers to provide delta_ut1_utc, so that automatic calculation of UT1 becomes possible. [#1145]
    • Add datetime format which allows converting to and from standard library datetime.datetime objects. [#860]
    • Add plot_date format which allows converting to and from the date representation used when plotting dates with matplotlib via the matplotlib.pyplot.plot_date function. [#860]
    • Add gps format (seconds since 1980-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, including leap seconds) [#1164]
    • Add array indexing to Time objects [#1132]
    • Allow for arithmetic of multi-element and single-element Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1081]
    • Allow multiplication and division of TimeDelta objects by constants and arrays, as well as changing sign (negation) and taking the absolute value of TimeDelta objects. [#1082]
    • Allow comparisons of Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1171]
    • Support interaction of Time and Quantity objects that represent a time interval. [#1431]

  • astropy.units

    • Added parallax equivalency for length-angle. [#985]
    • Added mass-energy equivalency. [#1333]
    • Added a new-style format method which will use format specifiers (like 0.03f) in new-style format strings for the Quantity's value. Specifiers which can't be applied to the value will fall back to the entire string representation of the quantity. [#1383]
    • Added support for complex number values in quantities. [#1384]
    • Added new spectroscopic equivalencies for velocity conversions (relativistic, optical, and radio conventions are supported) [#1200]
    • The spectral equivalency now also handles wave number.
    • The spectral_density equivalency now also accepts a Quantity for the frequency or wavelength. It also handles additional flux units.
    • Added Brightness Temperature (antenna gain) equivalency for conversion between T_B and flux density. [#1327]
    • Added percent unit, and allowed any string containing just a number to be interpreted as a scaled dimensionless unit. [#1409]
    • New-style format strings can be used to set the unit output format. For example, "{0:latex}".format(u.km) will print with the latex formatter. [#1462]
    • The Unit.is_equivalent method can now take a tuple. In this case, the method returns True if the unit is equivalent to any of the units listed in the tuple. [#1521]
    • def_unit can now take a 2-tuple of names of the form (short, long), where each entry is a list. This allows for handling strange units that might have multiple short names. [#1543]
    • Added dimensionless_angles equivalency, which allows conversion of any power of radian to dimensionless. [#1161]
    • Added the ability to enable set of units, or equivalencies that are used by default. Also provided context managers for these cases. [#1268]
    • Imperial units are disabled by default. [#1593, #1662]
    • Added an astropy.units.add_enabled_units context manager, which allows creating a temporary context with additional units temporarily enabled in the global units namespace. [#1662]
    • Unit instances now have .si and .cgs properties a la Quantity. These serve as shortcuts for Unit.to_system(cgs)[0] etc. [#1610]

  • astropy.vo

    • New package added to support Virtual Observatory Simple Cone Search query and service validation. [#552]

  • astropy.wcs

    • Fixed attribute error in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm (lattype->lattyp) [#1463]
    • Included a new command-line script called wcslint and accompanying API for validating the WCS in a given FITS file or header. [#580]
    • Upgraded included version of WCSLIB to 4.19.

  • astropy.utils

    • Added a new set of utilities in astropy.utils.timer for analyzing the runtime of functions and making runtime predections for larger inputs. [#743]
    • ProgressBar and Spinner classes can now be used directly to return generator expressions. [#771]
    • Added astropy.utils.iers which allows reading in of IERS A or IERS B bulletins and interpolation in UT1-UTC.
    • Added a function astropy.utils.find_api_page--given a class or object from the astropy package, this will open that class's API documentation in a web browser. [#663]
    • Data download functions such as download_file now accept a show_progress argument to suppress console output, and a timeout argument. [#865, #1258]

  • astropy.extern.six

    • Added six for python2/python3 compatibility

  • Astropy now uses the ERFA library instead of the IAU SOFA library for fundamental time transformation routines. The ERFA library is derived, with permission, from the IAU SOFA library but is distributed under a BSD license. See license/ERFA.rst for details. [#1293]

  • astropy.logger

    • The Astropy logger now no longer catches exceptions by default, and also only captures warnings emitted by Astropy itself (prior to this change, following an import of Astropy, any warning got re-directed through the Astropy logger). Logging to the Astropy log file has also been disabled by default. However, users of Astropy 0.2 will likely still see the previous behavior with Astropy 0.3 for exceptions and logging to file since the default configuration file installed by 0.2 set the exception logging to be on by default. To get the new behavior, set the log_exceptions and log_to_file configuration items to False in the astropy.cfg file. [#1331]

API Changes

  • General

    • The configuration option utils.console.use_unicode has been moved to the top level and renamed to unicode_output. It now not only affects console widgets, such as progress bars, but also controls whether calling unicode on certain classes will return a string containing unicode characters.

  • astropy.coordinates

    • The astropy.coordinates.Angle class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1006]
    • The astropy.coordinates.Distance class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1472]
      • All angular units are now supported, not just radian, degree and hour, but now arcsecond and arcminute as well. The object will retain its native unit, so when printing out a value initially provided in hours, its to_string() will, by default, also be expressed in hours.
      • The Angle class now supports arrays of angles.
      • To be consistent with units.Unit, Angle.format has been deprecated and renamed to Angle.to_string.
      • To be consistent with astropy.units, all plural forms of unit names have been removed. Therefore, the following properties of astropy.coordinates.Angle should be renamed:
        • radians -> radian
        • degrees -> degree
        • hours -> hour
      • Multiplication and division of two Angle objects used to raise NotImplementedError. Now they raise TypeError.
    • The astropy.coordinates.Angle class no longer has a bounds attribute so there is no bounds-checking or auto-wrapping at this level. This allows Angle objects to be used in arbitrary arithmetic expressions (e.g. coordinate distance computation).
    • The astropy.coordinates.RA and astropy.coordinates.Dec classes have been removed and replaced with astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude respectively. These are now used for the components of Galactic and Horizontal (Alt-Az) coordinates as well instead of plain Angle objects.
    • astropy.coordinates.angles.rotation_matrix and astropy.coordinates.angles.angle_axis now take a unit kwarg instead of degrees kwarg to specify the units of the angles. rotation_matrix will also take the unit from the given Angle object if no unit is provided.
    • The AngularSeparation class has been removed. The output of the coordinates separation() method is now an astropy.coordinates.Angle. [#1007]
    • The coordinate classes have been renamed in a way that remove the Coordinates at the end of the class names. E.g., ICRSCoordinates from previous versions is now called ICRS. [#1614]
    • HorizontalCoordinates are now named AltAz, to reflect more common terminology.

  • astropy.cosmology

    • The Planck (2013) cosmology will likely give slightly different (and more accurate) results due to the inclusion of Neutrino masses. [#1364]
    • Cosmology class properties now return Quantity objects instead of simple floating-point values. [#1237]
    • The names of cosmology instances are now truly optional, and are set to None rather than the name of the class if the user does not provide them. [#1705]

  • astropy.io.ascii

    • In the read method of astropy.io.ascii, empty column values in an ASCII table are now treated as missing values instead of the previous treatment as a zero-length string "". This now corresponds to the behavior of other table readers like numpy.genfromtxt. To restore the previous behavior set fill_values=None in the call to ascii.read(). [#919]
    • The read and write methods of astropy.io.ascii now have a format argument for specifying the file format. This is the preferred way to choose the format instead of the Reader and Writer arguments. [#961]
    • The include_names and exclude_names arguments were removed from the BaseHeader initializer, and now instead handled by the reader and writer classes directly. [#1350]
    • Allow numeric and otherwise unusual column names when reading a table where the format argument is specified, but other format details such as the delimiter or quote character are being guessed. [#1692]
    • When reading an ASCII table using the Table.read() method, the default has changed from guess=False to guess=True to allow auto-detection of file format. This matches the default behavior of ascii.read().

  • astropy.io.fits

    • The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is marked "pending deprecation". This does not mean it will be removed outright or that its functionality has changed. It will likely be replaced in the future for a function with similar, if not subtly different functionality. A better, if not slightly more verbose approach is to use pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns to create a new FITS_rec table--this has the same interface as pyfits.new_table. The difference is that it returns a plan FITS_rec array, and not an HDU instance. This FITS_rec object can then be used as the data argument in the constructors for BinTableHDU (for binary tables) or TableHDU (for ASCII tables). This is analogous to creating an ImageHDU by passing in an image array. pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns is just a simpler way of creating a FITS-compatible recarray from a FITS column specification.
    • The updateHeader, updateHeaderData, and updateCompressedData methods of the CompDataHDU class are pending deprecation and moved to internal methods. The operation of these methods depended too much on internal state to be used safely by users; instead they are invoked automatically in the appropriate places when reading/writing compressed image HDUs.
    • The CompDataHDU.compData attribute is pending deprecation in favor of the clearer and more PEP-8 compatible CompDataHDU.compressed_data.
    • The constructor for CompDataHDU has been changed to accept new keyword arguments. The new keyword arguments are essentially the same, but are in underscore_separated format rather than camelCase format. The old arguments are still pending deprecation.
    • The internal attributes of HDU classes _hdrLoc, _datLoc, and _datSpan have been replaced with _header_offset, _data_offset, and _data_size respectively. The old attribute names are still pending deprecation. This should only be of interest to advanced users who have created their own HDU subclasses.
    • The following previously deprecated functions and methods have been removed entirely: createCard, createCardFromString, upperKey, ColDefs.data, setExtensionNameCaseSensitive, _File.getfile, _TableBaseHDU.get_coldefs, Header.has_key, Header.ascardlist.
    • Interfaces that were pending deprecation are now fully deprecated. These include: create_card, create_card_from_string, upper_key, Header.get_history, and Header.get_comment.
    • The .name attribute on HDUs is now directly tied to the HDU's header, so that if .header['EXTNAME'] changes so does .name and vice-versa.

  • astropy.io.registry

    • Identifier functions for reading/writing Table and NDData objects should now accept (origin, *args, **kwargs) instead of (origin, args, kwargs). [#591]
    • Added a new astropy.io.registry.get_formats function for listing registered I/O formats and details about the their readers/writers. [#1669]

  • astropy.io.votable

    • Added a new option use_names_over_ids option to use when converting from VOTable objects to Astropy Tables. This can prevent a situation where column names are not preserved when converting from a VOTable. [#609]

  • astropy.nddata

    • The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution, and the make_kernel function has been removed. (the kernel classes should be used instead) [#1451]

  • astropy.stats.funcs

    • For sigma_clip, the maout optional parameter has been removed, and the function now always returns a masked array. A new boolean parameter copy can be used to indicated whether the input data should be copied (copy=True, default) or used by reference (copy=False) in the output masked array. [#1083]

  • astropy.table

    • The first argument to the Column and MaskedColumn classes is now the data array--the name argument has been changed to an optional keyword argument. [#840]
    • Added support for instantiating a Table from a list of dict, each one representing a single row with the keys mapping to column names. [#901]
    • The plural 'units' and 'dtypes' have been switched to 'unit' and 'dtype' where appropriate. The original attributes are still present in this version as deprecated attributes, but will be removed in the next version. [#1174]
    • The copy methods of Column and MaskedColumn were changed so that the first argument is now order='C'. This is required for compatibility with Numpy 1.8 which is currently in development. [#1250]
    • Comparing a column (with == or !=) to a scalar, an array, or another column now always returns a boolean Numpy array (which is a masked array if either of the arguments in the comparison was masked). This is in contrast to the previous behavior, which in some cases returned a boolean Numpy array, and in some cases returned a boolean Column object. [#1446]

  • astropy.time

    • For consistency with Quantity, the attributes val and is_scalar have been renamed to value and isscalar, respectively, and the attribute vals has been dropped. [#767]
    • The double-float64 internal representation of time is used more efficiently to enable better accuracy. [#366]
    • Format and scale arguments are now allowed to be case-insensitive. [#1128]

  • astropy.units

    • The Quantity class now inherits from the Numpy array class, and includes the following API changes [#929]:
      • Using float(...), int(...), and long(...) on a quantity will now only work if the quantity is dimensionless and unscaled.
      • All Numpy ufuncs should now treat units correctly (or raise an exception if not supported), rather than extract the value of quantities and operate on this, emitting a warning about the implicit loss of units.
      • When using relevant Numpy ufuncs on dimensionless quantities (e.g. np.exp(h * nu / (k_B * T))), or combining dimensionless quantities with Python scalars or plain Numpy arrays 1 + v / c, the dimensionless Quantity will automatically be converted to an unscaled dimensionless Quantity.
      • When initializing a quantity from a value with no unit, it is now set to be dimensionless and unscaled by default. When initializing a Quantity from another Quantity and with no unit specified in the initializer, the unit is now taken from the unit of the Quantity being initialized from.
    • Strings are no longer allowed as the values for Quantities. [#1005]
    • Quantities are always comparable with zero regardless of their units. [#1254]
    • The exception astropy.units.UnitsException has been renamed to astropy.units.UnitsError to be more consistent with the naming of built-in Python exceptions. [#1406]
    • Multiplication with and division by a string now always returns a Unit (rather than a Quantity when the string was first) [#1408]
    • Imperial units are disabled by default.

  • astropy.wcs

    • For those including the astropy.wcs C headers in their project, they should now include it as:

      #include "astropy_wcs/astropy_wcs_api.h"

      instead of:

      #include "astropy_wcs_api.h"

      [#1631]

  • The --enable-legacy option for setup.py has been removed. [#1493]

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.io.ascii
    • The write() function was ignoring the fill_values argument. [#910]
    • Fixed an issue in DefaultSplitter.join where the delimiter attribute was ignored when writing the CSV. [#1020]
    • Fixed writing of IPAC tables containing null values. [#1366]
    • When a table with no header row was read without specifying the format and using the names argument, then the first row could be dropped. [#1692]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Binary tables containing compressed images may, optionally, contain other columns unrelated to the tile compression convention. Although this is an uncommon use case, it is permitted by the standard.
    • Reworked some of the file I/O routines to allow simpler, more consistent mapping between OS-level file modes ('rb', 'wb', 'ab', etc.) and the more "PyFITS-specific" modes used by PyFITS like "readonly" and "update". That is, if reading a FITS file from an open file object, it doesn't matter as much what "mode" it was opened in so long as it has the right capabilities (read/write/etc.) Also works around bugs in the Python io module in 2.6+ with regard to file modes.
    • Fixed a long-standing issue where writing binary tables did not correctly write the TFORMn keywords for variable-length array columns (they omitted the max array length parameter of the format). This was thought fixed in an earlier version, but it was only fixed for compressed image HDUs and not for binary tables in general.
  • astropy.nddata
    • Fixed crash when trying to multiple or divide NDData objects with uncertainties. [#1547]
  • astropy.table
    • Using a list of strings to index a table now correctly returns a new table with the columns named in the list. [#1454]
    • Inequality operators now work properly with Column objects. [#1685]
  • astropy.time
    • Time scale and format attributes are now shown when calling dir() on a Time object. [#1130]
  • astropy.wcs
    • Fixed assignment to string-like WCS attributes on Python 3. [#956]
  • astropy.units
    • Fixed a bug that caused the order of multiplication/division of plain Numpy arrays with Quantities to matter (i.e. if the plain array comes first the units were not preserved in the output). [#899]
    • Directly instantiated CompositeUnits were made printable without crashing. [#1576]
  • Misc
    • Fixed various modules that hard-coded sys.stdout as default arguments to functions at import time, rather than using the runtime value of sys.stdout. [#1648]
    • Minor documentation fixes and enhancements [#922, #1034, #1210, #1217, #1491, #1492, #1498, #1582, #1608, #1621, #1646, #1670, #1756]
    • Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when running the test suite on systems with platform names containing non-ASCII characters. [#1698]

Other Changes and Additions

  • General
    • Astropy now follows the PSF Code of Conduct. [#1216]
    • Astropy's test suite now tests all doctests in inline docstrings. Support for running doctests in the reST documentation is planned to follow in v0.3.1.
    • Astropy's test suite can be run on multiple CPUs in parallel, often greatly improving runtime, using the --parallel option. [#1040]
    • A warning is now issued when using Astropy with Numpy < 1.5--much of Astropy may still work in this case but it shouldn't be expected to either. [#1479]
    • Added automatic download/build/installation of Numpy during Astropy installation if not already found. [#1483]
    • Handling of metadata for the NDData and Table classes has been unified by way of a common MetaData descriptor--it allows instantiating an object with metadata of any mapping type, and subsequently prevents replacing the mapping stored in the .meta attribute (only direct updates to that object are allowed). [#1686]
  • astropy.coordinates
    • Angles containing out of bounds minutes or seconds (eg. 60) can be parsed--the value modulo 60 is used with carry to the hours/minutes, and a warning is issued rather than raising an exception. [#990]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • The new compression code also adds support for the ZQUANTIZ and ZDITHER0 keywords added in more recent versions of this FITS Tile Compression spec. This includes support for lossless compression with GZIP. (#198) By default no dithering is used, but the SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_1 and SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_2 methods can be enabled by passing the correct constants to the quantize_method argument to the CompImageHDU constructor. A seed can be manually specified, or automatically generated using either the system clock or checksum-based methods via the dither_seed argument. See the documentation for CompImageHDU for more details.
    • Images compressed with the Tile Compression standard can now be larger than 4 GB through support of the Q format.
    • All HDUs now have a .ver .level attribute that returns the value of the EXTVAL and EXTLEVEL keywords from that HDU's header, if the exist. This was added for consistency with the .name attribute which returns the EXTNAME value from the header.
    • Then Column and ColDefs classes have new .dtype attributes which give the Numpy dtype for the column data in the first case, and the full Numpy compound dtype for each table row in the latter case.
    • There was an issue where new tables created defaulted the values in all string columns to '0.0'. Now string columns are filled with empty strings by default--this seems a less surprising default, but it may cause differences with tables created with older versions of PyFITS or Astropy.
  • astropy.io.misc
    • The HDF5 reader can now refer to groups in the path as well as datasets; if given a group, the first dataset in that group is read. [#1159]
  • astropy.nddata
    • NDData objects have more helpful, though still rudimentary __str__` and ``__repr__ displays. [#1313]
  • astropy.units
    • Added 'cycle' unit. [#1160]
    • Extended units supported by the CDS formatter/parser. [#1468]
    • Added unicode an LaTeX symbols for liter. [#1618]
  • astropy.wcs
    • Redundant SCAMP distortion parameters are removed with SIP distortions are also present. [#1278]
    • Added iterative implementation of all_world2pix that can be reliably inverted. [#1281]

0.2.5 (2013-10-25)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.coordinates
    • Fixed incorrect string formatting of Angles using precision=0. [#1319]
    • Fixed string formatting of Angles using decimal=True which ignored the precision argument. [#1323]
    • Fixed parsing of format strings using appropriate unicode characters instead of the ASCII - for minus signs. [#1429]
  • astropy.io.ascii
    • Fixed a crash in the IPAC table reader when the include/exclude_names option is set. [#1348]
    • Fixed writing AASTex tables to honor the tabletype option. [#1372]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Improved round-tripping and preservation of manually assigned column attributes (TNULLn, TSCALn, etc.) in table HDU headers. (Note: This issue was previously reported as fixed in Astropy v0.2.2 by mistake; it is not fixed until v0.3.) [#996]
    • Fixed a bug that could cause a segfault when trying to decompress an compressed HDU whose contents are truncated (due to a corrupt file, for example). This still causes a Python traceback but better that than a segfault. [#1332]
    • Newly created CompImageHDU HDUs use the correct value of the DEFAULT_COMPRESSION_TYPE module-level constant instead of hard-coding "RICE_1" in the header.
    • Fixed a corner case where when extra memory is allocated to compress an image, it could lead to unnecessary in-memory copying of the compressed image data and a possible memory leak through Numpy.
    • Fixed a bug where assigning from an mmap'd array in one FITS file over the old (also mmap'd) array in another FITS file failed to update the destination file. Corresponds to PyFITS issue 25.
    • Some miscellaneous documentation fixes.
  • astropy.io.votable
    • Added a warning for when a VOTable 1.2 file contains no RESOURCES elements (at least one should be present). [#1337]
    • Fixed a test failure specific to MIPS architecture caused by an errant floating point warning. [#1179]
  • astropy.nddata.convolution
    • Prevented in-place modification of the input arrays to convolve(). [#1153]
  • astropy.table
    • Added HTML escaping for string values in tables when outputting the table as HTML. [#1347]
    • Added a workaround in a bug in Numpy that could cause a crash when accessing a table row in a masked table containing dtype=object columns. [#1229]
    • Fixed an issue similar to the one in #1229, but specific to unmasked tables. [#1403]
  • astropy.units
    • Improved error handling for unparseable units and fixed parsing CDS units without mantissas in the exponent. [#1288]
    • Added a physical type for spectral flux density. [#1410]
    • Normalized conversions that should result in a scale of exactly 1.0 to round off slight floating point imprecisions. [#1407]
    • Added support in the CDS unit parser/formatter for unusual unit prefixes that are nonetheless required to be supported by that convention. [#1426]
    • Fixed the parsing of sqrt() in unit format strings which was returning unit ** 2 instead of unit ** 0.5. [#1458]
  • astropy.wcs
    • When passing a single array to the wcs transformation functions, (astropy.wcs.Wcs.all_pix2world, etc.), its second dimension must now exactly match the number of dimensions in the transformation. [#1395]
    • Improved error message when incorrect arguments are passed to WCS.wcs_world2pix. [#1394]
    • Fixed a crash when trying to read WCS from FITS headers on Python 3.3 in Windows. [#1363]
    • Only headers that are required as part of the WCSLIB C API are installed by the package, per request of system packagers. [#1666]
  • Misc
    • Fixed crash when the COLUMNS environment variable is set to a non-integer value. [#1291]
    • Fixed a bug in ProgressBar.map where multiprocess=True could cause it to hang on waiting for the process pool to be destroyed. [#1381]
    • Fixed a crash on Python 3.2 when affiliated packages try to use the astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_* functions. [#1256]
    • Fixed a minor path normalization issue that could occur on Windows in astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_filename. [#1444]
    • Fixed an annoyance where configuration items intended only for testing showed up in users' astropy.cfg files. [#1477]
    • Prevented crashes in exception logging in unusual cases where no traceback is associated with the exception. [#1518]
    • Fixed a crash when running the tests in unusual environments where sys.stdout.encoding is None. [#1530]
    • Miscellaneous documentation fixes and improvements [#1308, #1317, #1377, #1393, #1362, #1516]

Other Changes and Additions

  • Astropy installation now requests setuptools >= 0.7 during build/installation if neither distribute or setuptools >= 0.7 is already installed. In other words, if import setuptools fails, ez_setup.py is used to bootstrap the latest setuptools (rather than using distribute_setup.py to bootstrap the now obsolete distribute package). [#1197]
  • When importing Astropy from a source checkout without having built the extension modules first an ImportError is raised rather than a SystemExit exception. [#1269]

0.2.4 (2013-07-24)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.coordinates
    • Fixed the angle parser to support parsing the string "1 degree". [#1168]
  • astropy.cosmology
    • Fixed a crash in the comoving_volume method on non-flat cosmologies when passing it an array of redshifts.
  • astropy.io.ascii
    • Fixed a bug that prevented saving changes to the comment symbol when writing changes to a table. [#1167]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Added a workaround for a bug in 64-bit OSX that could cause truncation when writing files greater than 2^32 bytes in size. [#839]
  • astropy.io.votable
    • Fixed incorrect reading of tables containing multiple <RESOURCE> elements. [#1223]
  • astropy.table
    • Fixed a bug where Table.remove_column and Table.rename_column could cause a masked table to lose its masking. [#1120]
    • Fixed bugs where subclasses of Table did not preserver their class in certain operations. [#1142]
    • Fixed a bug where slicing a masked table did not preserve the mask. [#1187]
  • astropy.units
    • Fixed a bug where the .si and .cgs properties of dimensionless Quantity objects raised a ZeroDivisionError. [#1150]
    • Fixed a bug where multiple subsequent calls to the .decompose() method on array quantities applied a scale factor each time. [#1163]
  • Misc
    • Fixed an installation crash that could occur sometimes on Debian/Ubuntu and other *NIX systems where pkg_resources can be installed without installing setuptools. [#1150]
    • Updated the distribute_setup.py bootstrapper to use setuptools >= 0.7 when installing on systems that don't already have an up to date version of distribute/setuptools. [#1180]
    • Changed the version.py template so that Astropy affiliated packages can (and they should) use their own cython_version.py and utils._compiler modules where appropriate. This issue only pertains to affiliated package maintainers. [#1198]
    • Fixed a corner case where the default config file generation could crash if building with matplotlib but not Sphinx installed in a virtualenv. [#1225]
    • Fixed a crash that could occur in the logging module on systems that don't have a default preferred encoding (in particular this happened in some versions of PyCharm). [#1244]
    • The Astropy log now supports passing non-string objects (and calling str() on them by default) to the logging methods, in line with Python's standard logging API. [#1267]
    • Minor documentation fixes [#582, #696, #1154, #1194, #1212, #1213, #1246, #1252]

Other Changes and Additions

  • astropy.cosmology
    • Added a new Plank13 object representing the Plank 2013 results. [#895]
  • astropy.units
    • Performance improvements in initialization of Quantity objects with a large number of elements. [#1231]

0.2.3 (2013-05-30)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.time
    • Fixed inaccurate handling of leap seconds when converting from UTC to UNIX timestamps. [#1118]
    • Tightened required accuracy in many of the time conversion tests. [#1121]
  • Misc
    • Fixed a regression that was introduced in v0.2.2 by the fix to issue #992 that was preventing installation of Astropy affiliated packages that use Astropy's setup framework. [#1124]

0.2.2 (2013-05-21)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.io
    • Fixed issues in both the fits and votable sub-packages where array byte order was not being handled consistently, leading to possible crashes especially on big-endian systems. [#1003]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • When an error occurs opening a file in fitsdiff the exception message will now at least mention which file had the error.
    • Fixed a couple cases where creating a new table using TDIMn in some of the columns could cause a crash.
    • Slightly refactored how tables containing variable-length array columns are handled to add two improvements: Fixes an issue where accessing the data after a call to the astropy.io.fits.getdata convenience function caused an exception, and allows the VLA data to be read from an existing mmap of the FITS file.
    • Fixed a bug on Python 3 where attempting to open a non-existent file on Python 3 caused a seemingly unrelated traceback.
    • Fixed an issue in the tests that caused some tests to fail if Astropy is installed with read-only permissions.
    • Fixed a bug where instantiating a BinTableHDU from a numpy array containing boolean fields converted all the values to False.
    • Fixed an issue where passing an array of integers into the constructor of Column() when the column type is floats of the same byte width caused the column array to become garbled.
    • Fixed inconsistent behavior in creating CONTINUE cards from byte strings versus unicode strings in Python 2--CONTINUE cards can now be created properly from unicode strings (so long as they are convertable to ASCII).
    • Fixed a bug in parsing HIERARCH keywords that do not have a space after the first equals sign (before the value).
    • Prevented extra leading whitespace on HIERARCH keywords from being treated as part of the keyword.
    • Fixed a bug where HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters was mistakenly marked as invalid during header validation along with an ancillary issue where the Header.index() method id not work correctly with HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters.
    • Disallowed assigning NaN and Inf floating point values as header values, since the FITS standard does not define a way to represent them in. Because this is undefined, the previous behavior did not make sense and produced invalid FITS files. [#954]
    • Fixed an obscure issue that can occur on systems that don't have flush to memory-mapped files implemented (namely GNU Hurd). [#968]
  • astropy.io.votable
    • Stopped deprecation warnings from the astropy.io.votable package that could occur during setup. [#970]
    • Fixed an issue where INFO elements were being incorrectly dropped when occurring inside a TABLE element. [#1000]
    • Fixed obscure test failures on MIPS platforms. [#1010]
  • astropy.nddata.convolution
    • Fixed an issue in make_kernel() when using an Airy function kernel. Also removed the superfluous 'brickwall' option. [#939]
  • astropy.table
    • Fixed a crash that could occur when adding a row to an empty (rowless) table with masked columns. [#973]
    • Made it possible to assign to one table row from the value of another row, effectively making it easier to copy rows, for example. [#1019]
  • astropy.time
    • Added appropriate __copy__ and __deepcopy__ behavior; this omission caused a seemingly unrelated error in FK5 coordinate separation. [#891]
  • astropy.units
    • Fixed an issue where the isiterable() utility returned True for quantities with scalar values. Added an __iter__ method for the Quantity class and fixed isiterable() to catch false positives. [#878]
    • Fixed previously undefined behavior when multiplying a unit by a string. [#949]
    • Added 'time' as a physical type--this was a simple omission. [#959]
    • Fixed issues with pickling unit objects so as to play nicer with the multiprocessing module. [#974]
    • Made it more difficult to accidentally override existing units with a new unit of the same name. [#1070]
    • Added several more physical types and units that were previously omitted, including 'mass density', 'specific volume', 'molar volume', 'momentum', 'angular momentum', 'angular speed', 'angular acceleration', 'electric current', 'electric current density', 'electric field strength', 'electric flux density', 'electric charge density', 'permittivity', 'electromagnetic field strength', 'radiant intensity', 'data quantity', 'bandwidth'; and 'knots', 'nautical miles', 'becquerels', and 'curies' respectively. [#1072]
  • Misc
    • Fixed a permission error that could occur when running astropy.test() on Python 3 when Astropy is installed as root. [#811]
    • Made it easier to filter warnings from the convolve() function and from Quantity objects. [#853]
    • Fixed a crash that could occur in Python 3 when generation of the default config file fails during setup. [#952]
    • Fixed an unrelated error message that could occur when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without having build the extension modules first. This issue was claimed to be fixed in v0.2.1, but the fix itself had a bug. [#971]
    • Fixed a crash that could occur when running the build_sphinx setup command in Python 3. [#977]
    • Added a more helpful error message when trying to run the setup.py build_sphinx command when Sphinx is not installed. [#1027]
    • Minor documentation fixes and restructuring. [#935, #967, #978, #1004, #1028, #1047]

Other Changes and Additions

  • Some performance improvements to the astropy.units package, in particular improving the time it takes to import the sub-package. [#1015]

0.2.1 (2013-04-03)

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.coordinates
    • Fixed encoding errors that could occur when formatting coordinate objects in code using from __future__ import unicode_literals. [#817]
    • Fixed a bug where the minus sign was dropped when string formatting dms coordinates with -0 degrees. [#875]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Properly supports the ZQUANTIZ keyword used to support quantization level--this includes working support for lossless GZIP compression of images.
    • Fixed support for opening gzipped FITS files in a writeable mode. [#256]
    • Added a more helpful exception message when trying to read invalid values from a table when the required TNULLn keyword is missing. [#309]
    • More refactoring of the tile compression handling to work around a potential memory access violation that was particularly prevalent on Windows. [#507]
    • Fixed an integer size mismatch in the compression module that could affect 32-bit systems. [#786]
    • Fixed malformatting of the TFORMn keywords when writing compressed image tables (they omitted the max array length parameter from the variable-length array format).
    • Fixed a crash that could occur when writing a table containing multi- dimensional array columns from an existing file into a new file.
    • Fixed a bug in fitsdiff that reported two header keywords containing NaN as having different values.
  • astropy.io.votable
    • Fixed links to the astropy.io.votable documentation in the VOTable validator output. [#806]
    • When reading VOTables containing integers that are out of range for their column type, display a warning rather than raising an exception. [#825]
    • Changed the default string format for floating point values for better round-tripping. [#856]
    • Fixed opening VOTables through the Table.read() interface for tables that have no names. [#927]
    • Fixed creation of VOTables from an Astropy table that does not have a data mask. [#928]
    • Minor documentation fixes. [#932]
  • astropy.nddata.convolution
    • Added better handling of inf values to the convolve_fft family of functions. [#893]
  • astropy.table
    • Fixed silent failure to assign values to a row on multiple columns. [#764]
    • Fixed various buggy behavior when viewing a table after sorting by one of its columns. [#829]
    • Fixed using numpy.where() with table indexing. [#838]
    • Fixed a bug where opening a remote table with Table.read() could cause the entire table to be downloaded twice. [#845]
    • Fixed a bug where MaskedColumn no longer worked if the column being masked is renamed. [#916]
  • astropy.units
    • Added missing capability for array Quantitys to be initializable by a list of Quantitys. [#835]
    • Fixed the definition of year and lightyear to be in terms of Julian year per the IAU definition. [#861]
    • "degree" was removed from the list of SI base units. [#863]
  • astropy.wcs
    • Fixed TypeError when calling WCS.to_header_string(). [#822]
    • Added new method WCS.all_world2pix for converting from world coordinates to pixel space, including inversion of the astrometric distortion correction. [#1066, #1281]
  • Misc
    • Fixed a minor issue when installing with ./setup.py develop on a fresh git clone. This is likely only of interest to developers on Astropy. [#725]
    • Fixes a crash with ImportError: No module named 'astropy.version' when running setup.py from a source checkout for the first time on OSX with Python 3.3. [#820]
    • Fixed an installation issue where running ./setup.py install or when installing with pip the .astropy directory gets created in the home directory of the user running the command. The user's .astropy directory should only be created when they use Astropy, not when they install it. [#867]
    • Fixed an exception when creating a ProgressBar with a "total" of 0. [#752]
    • Added better documentation of behavior that can occur when trying to import the astropy package from within a source checkout without first building the extension modules. [#795, #864]
    • Added link to the installation instructions in the README. [#797]
    • Catches segfaults in xmllint which can occur sometimes and is otherwise out of our control. [#803]
    • Minor changes to the documentation template. [#805]
    • Fixed a minor exception handling bug in download_file(). [#808]
    • Added cleanup of any temporary files if an error occurs in download_file(). [#857]
    • Filesystem free space is checked for before attempting to download a file with download_file(). [#858]
    • Fixed package data locating to work across symlinks--required to work with some OS packaging layouts. [#827]
    • Fixed a bug when building Cython extensions where hidden files containing .pyx extensions could cause the build to crash. This can be an issue with software and filesystems that autogenerate hidden files. [#834]
    • Fixed bug that could cause a "script" called README.rst to be installed in a bin directory. [#852]
    • Fixed some miscellaneous and mostly rare reference leaks caught by cpychecker. [#914]

Other Changes and Additions

  • Added logo and branding for Windows binary installers. [#741]
  • Upgraded included version libexpat to 2.1.0. [#781]
  • ~25% performance improvement in unit composition/decomposition. [#836]
  • Added previously missing LaTeX formatting for L_sun and R_sun. [#841]
  • ConfigurationItems now have a more useful and informative __repr__ and improved documentation for how to use them. [#855]
  • Added a friendlier error message when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without first building the extension modules inplace. [#864]
  • py.test now outputs more system information for help in debugging issues from users. [#869]
  • Added unit definitions "mas" and "uas" for "milliarcsecond" and "microarcsecond" respectively. [#892]

0.2 (2013-02-19)

New Features

This is a brief overview of the new features included in Astropy 0.2--please see the "What's New" section of the documentation for more details.

  • astropy.coordinates

    • This new subpackage contains a representation of celestial coordinates, and provides a wide range of related functionality. While fully-functional, it is a work in progress and parts of the API may change in subsequent releases.

  • astropy.cosmology

    • Update to include cosmologies with variable dark energy equations of state. (This introduces some API incompatibilities with the older Cosmology objects).
    • Added parameters for relativistic species (photons, neutrinos) to the astropy.cosmology classes. The current treatment assumes that neutrinos are massless. [#365]
    • Add a WMAP9 object using the final (9-year) WMAP parameters from Hinshaw et al. 2013. It has also been made the default cosmology. [#629, #724]

  • astropy.table I/O infrastructure for custom readers/writers implemented. [#305]

    • Added support for reading/writing HDF5 files [#461]
    • Added support for masked tables with missing or invalid data [#451]

  • New astropy.time sub-package. [#332]

  • New astropy.units sub-package that includes a class for units (astropy.units.Unit) and scalar quantities that have units (astropy.units.Quantity). [#370, #445]

    This has the following effects on other sub-packages:

    • In astropy.wcs, the wcs.cunit list now takes and returns astropy.units.Unit objects. [#379]
    • In astropy.nddata, units are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#382]
    • In astropy.table, units on columns are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#380]
    • In astropy.constants, constants are now stored as astropy.units.Quantity objects. [#529]

  • astropy.io.ascii

    • Improved integration with the astropy.table Table class so that table and column metadata (e.g. keywords, units, description, formatting) are directly available in the output table object. The CDS, DAOphot, and IPAC format readers now provide this type of integrated metadata.
    • Changed to using astropy.table masked tables instead of NumPy masked arrays for tables with missing values.
    • Added SExtractor table reader to astropy.io.ascii [#420]
    • Removed the Memory reader class which was used to convert data input passed to the write function into an internal table. Instead write instantiates an astropy Table object using the data input to write.
    • Removed the NumpyOutputter as the output of reading a table is now always a Table object.
    • Removed the option of supplying a function as a column output formatter.
    • Added a new strip_whitespace keyword argument to the write function. This controls whether whitespace is stripped from the left and right sides of table elements before writing. Default is True.
    • Fixed a bug in reading IPAC tables with null values.

  • Generalized I/O infrastructure so that astropy.nddata can also have custom readers/writers [#659]

  • astropy.wcs

    • From updating the the underlying wcslib 4.16:
      • When astropy.wcs.WCS constructs a default coordinate representation it will give it the special name "DEFAULTS", and will not report "Found one coordinate representation".

Other Changes and Additions

  • A configuration file with all options set to their defaults is now generated when astropy is installed. This file will be pulled in as the users' astropy configuration file the first time they import astropy. [#498]
  • Astropy doc themes moved into astropy.sphinx to allow affiliated packages to access them.
  • Added expanded documentation for the astropy.cosmology sub-package. [#272]
  • Added option to disable building of "legacy" packages (pyfits, vo, etc.).
  • The value of the astronomical unit (au) has been updated to that adopted by IAU 2012 Resolution B2, and the values of the pc and kpc constants have been updated to reflect this. [#368]
  • Added links to the documentation pages to directly edit the documentation on GitHub. [#347]
  • Several updates merged from pywcs into astropy.wcs [#384]:
    • Improved the reading of distortion images.
    • Added a new option to choose whether or not to write SIP coefficients.
    • Uses the relax option by default so that non-standard keywords are allowed. [#585]
  • Added HTML representation of tables in IPython notebook [#409]
  • Rewrote CFITSIO-based backend for handling tile compression of FITS files. It now uses a standard CFITSIO instead of heavily modified pieces of CFITSIO as before. Astropy ships with its own copy of CFITSIO v3.30, but system packagers may choose instead to strip this out in favor of a system-installed version of CFITSIO. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 169. [#318]
  • Moved astropy.config.data to astropy.utils.data and re-factored the I/O routines to separate out the generic I/O code that can be used to open any file or resource from the code used to access Astropy-related data. The 'core' I/O routine is now get_readable_fileobj, which can be used to access any local as well as remote data, supports caching, and can decompress gzip and bzip2 files on-the-fly. [#425]
  • Added a classmethod to astropy.coordinates.coordsystems.SphericalCoordinatesBase that performs a name resolve query using Sesame to retrieve coordinates for the requested object. This works for any subclass of SphericalCoordinatesBase, but requires an internet connection. [#556]
  • astropy.nddata.convolution removed requirement of PyFFTW3; uses Numpy's FFT by default instead with the added ability to specify an FFT implementation to use. [#660]

Bug Fixes

  • astropy.io.ascii
    • Fixed crash when pprinting a row with INDEF values. [#511]
    • Fixed failure when reading DAOphot files with empty keyword values. [#666]
  • astropy.io.fits
    • Improved handling of scaled images and pseudo-unsigned integer images in compressed image HDUs. They now work more transparently like normal image HDUs with support for the do_not_scale_image_data and uint options, as well as scale_back and save_backup. The .scale() method works better too. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 88.
    • Permits non-string values for the EXTNAME keyword when reading in a file, rather than throwing an exception due to the malformatting. Added verification for the format of the EXTNAME keyword when writing. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 96.
    • Added support for EXTNAME and EXTVER in PRIMARY HDUs. That is, if EXTNAME is specified in the header, it will also be reflected in the .name attribute and in fits.info(). These keywords used to be verboten in PRIMARY HDUs, but the latest version of the FITS standard allows them. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 151.
    • HCOMPRESS can again be used to compress data cubes (and higher-dimensional arrays) so long as the tile size is effectively 2-dimensional. In fact, compatible tile sizes will automatically be used even if they're not explicitly specified. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 171.
    • Fixed a bug that could cause a deadlock in the filesystem on OSX when reading the data from certain types of FITS files. This only occurred when used in conjunction with Numpy 1.7. [#369]
    • Added support for the optional endcard parameter in the Header.fromtextfile() and Header.totextfile() methods. Although endcard=False was a reasonable default assumption, there are still text dumps of FITS headers that include the END card, so this should have been more flexible. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 176.
    • Fixed a crash when running fitsdiff on two empty (that is, zero row) tables. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 178.
    • Fixed an issue where opening a FITS file containing a random group HDU in update mode could result in an unnecessary rewriting of the file even if no changes were made. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 179.
    • Fixed a crash when generating diff reports from diffs using the ignore_comments options. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 181.
    • Fixed some bugs with WCS Paper IV record-valued keyword cards:
      • Cards that looked kind of like RVKCs but were not intended to be were over-permissively treated as such--commentary keywords like COMMENT and HISTORY were particularly affected. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 183.
      • Looking up a card in a header by its standard FITS keyword only should always return the raw value of that card. That way cards containing values that happen to valid RVKCs but were not intended to be will still be treated like normal cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.
      • Looking up a RVKC in a header with only part of the field-specifier (for example "DP1.AXIS" instead of "DP1.AXIS.1") was implicitly treated as a wildcard lookup. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.
    • Fixed a crash when diffing two FITS files where at least one contains a compressed image HDU which was not recognized as an image instead of a table. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 187.
    • Fixed a bug where opening a file containing compressed image HDUs in 'update' mode and then immediately closing it without making any changes caused the file to be rewritten unnecessarily.
    • Fixed two memory leaks that could occur when writing compressed image data, or in some cases when opening files containing compressed image HDUs in 'update' mode.
    • Fixed a bug where ImageHDU.scale(option='old') wasn't working at all--it was not restoring the image to its original BSCALE and BZERO values.
    • Fixed a bug when writing out files containing zero-width table columns, where the TFIELDS keyword would be updated incorrectly, leaving the table largely unreadable.
    • Fixed a minor string formatting issue.
    • Fixed bugs in the backwards compatibility layer for the CardList.index and CardList.count methods. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 190.
    • Improved __repr__ and text file representation of cards with long values that are split into CONTINUE cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 193.
    • Fixed a crash when trying to assign a long (> 72 character) value to blank ('') keywords. This also changed how blank keywords are represented--there are still exactly 8 spaces before any commentary content can begin; this may affect the exact display of header cards that assumed there could be fewer spaces in a blank keyword card before the content begins. However, the current approach is more in line with the requirements of the FITS standard. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 194.
  • astropy.io.votable
    • The Table class now maintains a single array object which is a Numpy masked array. For variable-length columns, the object that is stored there is also a Numpy masked array.
    • Changed the pedantic configuration option to be False by default due to the vast proliferation of non-compliant VO Tables. [#296]
    • Renamed astropy.io.vo to astropy.io.votable.
  • astropy.table
    • Added a workaround for an upstream bug in Numpy 1.6.2 that could cause a maximum recursion depth RuntimeError when printing table rows. [#341]
  • astropy.wcs
    • Updated to wcslib 4.15 [#418]
    • Fixed a problem with handling FITS headers on locales that do not use dot as a decimal separator. This required an upstream fix to wcslib which is included in wcslib 4.14. [#313]
  • Fixed some tests that could fail due to missing/incorrect logging configuration--ensures that tests don't have any impact on the default log location or contents. [#291]
  • Various minor documentation fixes [#293 and others]
  • Fixed a bug where running the tests with the py.test command still tried to replace the system-installed pytest with the one bundled with Astropy. [#454]
  • Improved multiprocessing compatibility for file downloads. [#615]
  • Fixed handling of Cython modules when building from a source checkout of a tagged release version. [#594]
  • Added a workaround for a bug in Sphinx that could occur when using the :tocdepth: directive. [#595]
  • Minor VOTable fixes [#596]
  • Fixed how setup.py uses distribute_setup.py to prevent possible VersionConflict errors when an older version of distribute is already installed on the user's system. [#616][#640]
  • Changed use of log.warn in the logging module to log.warning since the former is deprecated. [#624]

0.1 (2012-06-19)

  • Initial release.