[AstroPy] [ANN] Specutils v0.4 Release

[Nicholas Earl]

Dear colleagues,

The specutils developers are happy to announce the release of version 0.4 of the specutils package. You can install specutils in conda by doing:

$ conda install -c conda-forge specutils

or with pip:

$ pip install specutils

Specutils is an Astropy coordinated package providing a toolbox to represent, analyze, and manipulate spectroscopic data. For more context on the ecosystem specutils is meant to integrate with, see APE13: https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE13.rst 

This version of the package contains core data structures for spectra in python, utilities for loading of spectra in common formats, parsing of associated WCS, arithmetic, uncertainty handling, spectroscopic analysis and manipulation tools, integrated modeling and fitting, and robust spectral region interface. This latest release represents a complete refactor of the package from previous iterations, supporting Python 3.5+.  Therefore, the API may undergo some changes in the next few versions, based on your feedback.

That said, this is the first version of specutils that we consider “science-grade” - that is, containing many of the basic tools required for spectroscopic analysis.  We encourage you to try it out, leave comments in the github issue tracker, or implement your own improvements via Pull Request!

If you do indeed use specutils for analysis that is published, we ask that you cite specutil’s Zenodo DOI - see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421356 for bibtex templates for all versions.

Code: https://github.com/astropy/specutils

Documentation: https://specutils.readthedocs.io

Installation: https://specutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

Cheers,
Nicholas Earl
Erik Tollerud
Steve Crawford
Adam Ginsburg
and the specutils contributors