From aldcroft at head.cfa.harvard.edu Sun Jan 2 17:53:16 2011 From: aldcroft at head.cfa.harvard.edu (Tom Aldcroft) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 17:53:16 -0500 Subject: [AstroPy] asciitable 0.5.0 Message-ID: I'd like to announce the release of version 0.5.0 of asciitable, an extensible module for reading and writing ASCII tables. This release features a new function to guess the table format from the supported formats within asciitable. This function is now called by default within asciitable.read(). http://cxc.harvard.edu/contrib/asciitable/#guess-table-format Other updates include: - Added support for whitespace (tab or space) delimited tables by setting the delimiter parameter to "\s". - Improved support for RDB tables by parsing the second line which specifies column type and (optionally) width. These values are written out if available when writing an RDB table. - More rigorous checking of format compatibility for several table formats. Regards, Tom Aldcroft From hack at stsci.edu Fri Jan 14 15:57:22 2011 From: hack at stsci.edu (Warren J. Hack) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:57:22 -0500 Subject: [AstroPy] TABLES/STSDAS v3.13 and STSCI_PYTHON v2.11 NOW AVAILABLE Message-ID: <4D30B8B2.1070500@stsci.edu> ******************************************************* TABLES/STSDAS v3.13 and STSCI_PYTHON v2.11 NOW AVAILABLE ******************************************************* The Science Software Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute wishes to announce the availability of version 3.13 of the Space Telescope Science Data Analysis Software (STSDAS). Concurrent with the STSDAS release, we have also released v3.13 of the TABLES external package. Both of these packages are layered upon IRAF as external packages; it is therefore necessary to obtain and install IRAF (from http://iraf.noao.edu) before installing TABLES and STSDAS. STSDAS is linked against libraries in TABLES, so TABLES must be installed before STSDAS. This release of STSDAS contains changes to STIS, NICMOS, COS, and WFC3. This release includes the same versions of the calibration software used in the pipeline to support all active HST instruments using the algorithms developed from the data taken during Servicing Mission 4, especially for the new instruments Wide Field Camera 3(WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(COS). This release contains the latest version of the stecf IRAF package for supporting HST data that had been developed by members of the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) which closed on 31 December 2010. Support for these packages may be obtained by contacting the STScI Help Desk at 'help at stsci.edu'. These questions will then be forwarded to the package authors at ESO as required. STSDAS also includes some Python-based tasks; running these requires the STScI Python Libraries to be installed (all the non-Python tasks can be used in the traditional way and do not require Python or the STScI Python libraries). These tasks can only be run from PyRAF using standard IRAF CL task syntax, or within Python scripts using Python syntax. The Science Software Branch of STScI also wishes to announce the availability of version 2.11 of STSCI_PYTHON. STScI_Python is a collection of Python modules, packages and C extensions that has been developed to provide a general astronomical data analysis infrastructure. They can be used for Python tasks that are accessible from within STSDAS when running under PyRAF or standalone from within Python. All tasks in this release of STScI_Python rely on the use of numpy for array operations. All references to numarray and Numeric have been removed from the code, with support no longer being provided for use of numarray or Numeric. The primary testing for this release took place under Python 2.5.4 using numpy 2.0, although this code was also tested under Python 2.7 as well. This distribution continues to develop packages with tasks specific to each HST instrument, with updates being made to code for COS, while adding tasks for working with ACS data. The new tasks include one to correct for CTE effects in ACS images. This release also contains an updated version of Multidrizzle as used by the HST ACS and WFC3 pipelines, along with significantly updated versions of PyFITS and PyRAF. Significant updates were also made to TEAL (the EPAR-like parameter editor GUI) to provide more advanced behaviors and to document how it can be used as a GUI for running any command-line driven Python task. Use of the Python tasks requires upgrading to this version of STSCI_PYTHON. The updated version of PyRAF included in this release can be run in a "No-IRAF" mode, where the Python shell will run and - although no IRAF tasks will be found - the basic capabilities of the PyRAF command-line will still be supported. The release notes contain more specific information about what still works under PyRAF without IRAF. Finally, this release also includes the package, STWCS, an HST instrument specific library which provides detector to world coordinate transformations using all distortion model information available through the WCS keywords. Support for alternate WCS's in headers as described in WCS Paper I has now been added to the STWCS package. 64-bit IRAF Support =================== IRAF 2.15 includes support for 64-bit systems. The changes necessary to support 64-bits generally require applications to be modified. We will only release 32-bit binaries fo the Tables and STSDAS packages for use with IRAF 2.15. Support for 32-bit binaries will continue as long as there are sufficient plaforms that such binaries will run on. We may only convert some packages in Tables and STSDAS to 64-bit version when the 32-bit versions are no longer viable and if created will be released as a separate package with a different name. When the 32-bit versions of TABLES and STSDAS are no longer viable, support for any tasks within those packages not ported to 64-bits will end. The full description of this policy can be found online at: http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/stsdas/iraf64 Platform Support ================ This release does not contain STSDAS/Tables binaries for PowerPC Macintosh systems. However, there are no known reasons why a user could not build this package from source code on a PowerPC using the installation instructions for STSDAS. STSDAS/Tables Binaries for this release were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Solaris 5.8, and Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel architecture only). STSDAS/Tables Binaries were built with IRAF 2.14, except for Solaris, which were built with IRAF 2.12.2a. IRAF is available from http://iraf.net. In addition, this distribution of STScI_Python was tested to correctly support installation on Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Solaris, while also being provided for installation (without IRAF) under Windows. Solaris Support Ending ---------------------- This version will be the last version which will be tested against Solaris. We will also no longer be building Solaris binaries for STSDAS starting with this release, although the source code can always be downloaded and compiled locally as needed. STSCI_Python on WINDOWS ======================= This release includes a port of stsci_python that runs natively under Windows. PyRAF is not included for use with the Windows distribution, but the source distribution for STScI_Python could potentially be installed under Cygwin to work with the IRAF installation there, although that configuration has not been verified or tested. The primary requirement for use of this installer is that the Windows executables were built against and, therefore, can run only under Python 2.5. WHERE TO OBTAIN THIS SOFTWARE ============================= STSDAS/TABLES v3.13 can be downloaded from the STSDAS web site http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/stsdas/download Installation instructions are available on the web site. Precompiled binaries also exist for some of the ports supported by NOAO, including Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux and Mac OS X. STSCI_PYTHON v 2.11 be downloaded from the PyRAF web site http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci_python/current/download Installation instructions are available from the PyRAF web site, with support for installations on Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Please contact us through e-mail (help at stsci.edu), by telephone at (410) 338-1082. From mdroe at stsci.edu Wed Jan 19 13:17:53 2011 From: mdroe at stsci.edu (Michael Droettboom) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:17:53 -0500 Subject: [AstroPy] PyFITS 2.4 now available Message-ID: <4D372AD1.5030708@stsci.edu> **************************************** PyFITS Version 2.4 NOW AVAILABLE **************************************** The Science Software Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute wishes to announce the availability of version 2.4 of PyFITS. The following enhancements were added: - Checksum support now correctly conforms to the FITS standard. pyfits supports reading and writing both the old checksums and new standard-compliant checksums. The `fitscheck` command-line utility is provided to verify and update checksums. - Added a new optional keyword argument do_not_scale_image_data to the pyfits.open convenience function. When this argument is provided as True, and an ImageHDU is read that contains scaled data, the data is not automatically scaled when it is read. This option may be used when opening a fits file for update, when you only want to update some header data. Without the use of this argument, if the header updates required the size of the fits file to change, then when writing the updated information, the data would be read, scaled, and written back out in its scaled format (usually with a different data type) instead of in its non-scaled format. - Added a new optional keyword argument disable_image_compression to the pyfits.open function. When True, any compressed image HDU's will be read in like they are binary table HDU's. - Added a verify keyword argument to the pyfits.append function. When False, append will assume the existing FITS file is already valid and simply append new content to the end of the file, resulting in a large speed up appending to large files. - Added HDU methods update_ext_name and update_ext_version for updating the name and version of an HDU. - Added HDU method filebytes to calculate the number of bytes that will be written to the file associated with the HDU. - Enhanced the section class to allow reading non-contiguous image data. Previously, the section class could only be used to read contiguous data. (CNSHD781626) - Added method HDUList.fileinfo() that returns a dictionary with information about the location of header and data in the file associated with the HDU. The following bugs were fixed: - Reading in some malformed FITS headers would cause a NameError exception, rather than information about the cause of the error. - pyfits can now handle non-compliant CONTINUE cards produced by Java FITS. - BinTable columns with TSCALn are now byte-swapped correctly. - Ensure that floating-point card values are no longer than 20 characters. - Updated flush so that when the data has changed in an HDU for a file opened in update mode, the header will be updated to match the changed data before writing out the HDU. - Allow HIERARCH cards to contain a keyword and value whose total character length is 69 characters. Previous length was limited at 68 characters. - Calls to FITS_rec['columnName'] now return an ndarray. exactly the same as a call to FITS_rec.field('columnName') or FITS_rec.columnName. Previously, FITS_rec['columnName'] returned a much less useful fits_record object. (CNSHD789053) - Corrected the append convenience function to eliminate the reading of the HDU data from the file that is being appended to. (CNSHD794738) - Eliminated common symbols between the pyfitsComp module and the cfitsio and zlib libraries. These can cause problems on systems that use both PyFITS and cfitsio or zlib. (CNSHD795046) Release Notes ============= Release notes for all versions of PyFITS may be found at: http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits/release Where to Obtain this Software ============================= PyFITS can be downloaded for the PyFITS download web site: http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits/Download Installation instructions are available on the web site. Array Package Support ===================== As of version 2.3, PyFITS no longer supports the NUMARRAY array package.