[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro-0.4.54 released [alpha]

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce the first alpha-release after the fourth major
release: Gnuastro 0.4.54. Many new and exciting features have been
added to this release as fully described in the NEWS file (also see
[*]).

In particular, a new growth mechanism has now been implemented in
NoiseChisel which allows it to extend/grow the final set of true
detections deeper into the noise compared to before. It does slightly
increase the running time, but will dig out the low surface brightness
signal much more successfully, so its worth it. See below for more
details. Many other useful additions/changes have been made in the
other programs that make them much more easier to use.

I would be most grateful if you could try out this version and its new
features and share any bugs you might find or suggestions you might
have so we can make the 0.5 as bug-free as possible. If you are
unfamiliar with the `tar.lz' format, please see [**].

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[***]:
  http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.54-d952.tar.lz     [2.9MB]
  http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.4.54-d952.tar.lz.sig [488B]

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:
  9ec36637b504fb46a237a43993f2e6ec  gnuastro-0.4.54-d952.tar.lz
  7e74d1526d971d7d5f0398875401cddb74b10508  gnuastro-0.4.54-d952.tar.lz

I am very grateful to Boud Roukema for his great contributions to the
code/book and to Leindert Boogaard, Nicolas Bouché, Aurélien Jarno,
Takashi Ichikawa, Alan Lefor and David Valls-Gabaud for their great
help in reporting/fixing bugs and providing very useful suggestions.

This tarball was bootstrapped (built) with these tools:
  Texinfo 6.5
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15.1
  Help2man 1.47.5
  Gnulib v0.1-1679-gc4fdf2b76
  Autoconf archives v2017.09.28-3-gaea1451
Note that these are not installation dependencies, for those, please see
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Cheers,
Mohammad

--
Mohammad Akhlaghi,
Postdoctoral research fellow,
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL),
Observatoire de Lyon. 9, Avenue Charles André,
Saint Genis Laval (69230), France.





[*] The NEWS file for this release:

  New features
  ------------

  All programs: a value of `0' to the `--numthreads' option will use the
  number of threads available to the system at run time.

  Arithmetic: The new operators `filter-median' and `filter-mean' can be
  used to filter (smooth) the input. The size of the filter can be set as
  the other operands to these operators.

  BuildProgram: The new `--la' option allows the identification of a
  different Libtool `.la' file for Libtool linking information.

  BuildProgram: The new `--deletecompiled' option will delete the compiled
  program after running it.

  CosmicCalculator: all the various cosmological calculations can now be
  requested individually in one line with a specific option added for each
  calculation (for example `--age' or `--luminositydist' for the age of the
  universe at a given redshift or the luminosity distance). Therefore the
  old `--onlyvolume' and `--onlyabsmagconv' options are now removed. To
  effectively use these new features, please review the "Invoking
  CosmicCalculator" section of the book.

  Fits: when an extension/HDU is identified on the command-line with the
  `--hdu' option and no operation is requested, the full list of header
  keywords in that HDU will be printed (as if only `--printallkeys' was
  called).

  MakeCatalog: physical nature agnostic WCS column names. Previously the
  first WCS axis was always assumed to be RA and the second DEC. So for
  example even if you had a spectrum (with X and wavelength as the two WCS
  dimensions), you would have to ask for `--ra' and `--dec'. The new `--w1'
  and `--w2' options are now generic and don't assume any particular type
  only their order in the FITS header. MakeCatalog now also uses the CTYPE
  and CUNIT keywords to set the names and units of its output columns. The
  `--ra' and `--dec' options are now just internal aliases for `--w1' or
  `--w2' which will be determined based on the input's CTYPE keyword. Also
  the new `--geow1', `--geow2', `--clumpsw1', `--clumpsw2',
  `--clumpsgeow1', `--clumpsgeow2' options replace the old options
  `--geora', `--geodec', `--clumpsra', `--clumpsdec', `--clumpsgeora',
  `--clumpsgeodec'. No alias is currently defined for the latter group.

  MakeCatalog: The new `--uprange' option allows you to specify a range for
  the random values around each object. This is useful when the noise
  properties of the dataset vary gradually and sampling from the whole
  dataset might produce biased results.

  NoiseChisel: with the new `--widekernel' option it is now possible to use
  a wider kernel to identify which tiles contain signal. The rest of the
  steps (identifying the quantile threshold on the selected tiles and etc)
  are done on the dataset convolved with `--kernel' as they were
  before. Since it is time consuming, this is an optional feature.

  NoiseChisel: with the new `--qthreshtilequant' option, it is now possible
  to discard high-valued (outlier) tiles before estimating qthresh over the
  whole image. This can be useful in detecting very large diffuse/flat
  regions that would otherwise be detected as background (and effectively
  removed).

  NoiseChisel: the finally selected true detections are now grown based on
  signal contiguity, not by blind dilation. The growth process is the same
  as the growing of clumps to define objects. Only for true detections, the
  growth occurs in the noise. You can configure this growth with the
  `--detgrowquant' and `--detgrowmaxholesize'. With this new feature it is
  now possible to detect signal out to much lower surface brightness limits
  and the detections don't look boxy any more.

  Cosmology library: A new set of cosmology functions are now included in
  the library (declared in `gnuastro/cosmology.h'). These functions are
  also used in the CosmicCalculator program.

  `gal_fits_key_img_blank': returns the value that must be used in the
  BLANK keyword for the given type as defined by the FITS standard.

  `gal_txt_write' and `gal_fits_tab_write' now accept an extension name as
  argument to allow a name for the FITS extension they write.

  Removed features
  ----------------

  MakeCatalog: `--zeropoint' option doesn't have a short option name any
  more. Previously it was `-z' which was confusing because `-x' and `-y'
  were used to refer to image coordinate positions.

  NoiseChisel: The `--dilate' and `--dilatengb' options have been
  removed. Growing of true detections is no longer done through dilation
  but through the `--detgrowquant' and `--detgrowmaxholesize' options (see
  above).

  Changed features
  ----------------

  CosmicCalculator: The redshift is no longer mandatory. When no redshift
  is given, it will only print the input parameters (cosmology) and abort.

  MakeCatalog: when the output is a FITS file, the two object and clumps
  catalogs will be stored as multiple extensions of a single file. Until
  now, two separate FITS files would be created. Plain text outputs are the
  same as before (two files will be created).

  `gal_binary_fill_holes' now accepts a `connectivity' and `maxsize'
  argument to specify the connectivity of the holes and the maximum size of
  acceptable holes to fill.

  `gal_fits_img_read' and `gal_fits_img_read_to_type' now also read the WCS
  structure of the extension/HDU in a FITS file and have two extra
  arguments: `hstartwcs' and `hendwcs'. With these options it is possible
  to limit the range of header keywords to read the WCS, similar to how
  they are used in `gal_wcs_read'.

  `gal_txt_write', `gal_table_write_log', `gal_fits_tab_write' and
  `gal_txt_write' don't have the `dontdelete' argument any more. The action
  they take if the file already exists depends on the file: for FITS, a new
  extension will be added and for text, they will abort with an error.

  `gal_tile_block_write_const_value' and `gal_tile_full_values_write' now
  accept a new `withblank' option to set all pixels that are blank in the
  tile's block to be blank in the check image.

  `gal_wcs_pixel_area_arcsec2' will return NaN (instead of aborting) when
  input is unreasonable (not two dimensions or not in units of degrees).

  `gal_wcs_world_to_img' and `gal_wcs_img_to_world': Until now, these two
  WCS conversion functions would explicitly assume RA and Dec and work
  based on input arrays (so for example it was also necessary to give the
  number of elements and etc). They now accept `gal_data_t' as input for
  the input coordinates, thus their API has been greatly simplified and
  their functionality increased.

  Bug fixes
  ---------

  ConvertType crash when changing values (bug #52010).

  Arithmetic not accounting for integer blank pixels in binary operators
  (bug #52014).

  NoiseChisel segfault when memory mapping to a file (bug #52043).

  CFITSIO 3.42 and libcurl crash at Gnuastro configure time (bug #52152).

  MakeCatalog crash in upper-limit with full size label (bug #52281).

  NoiseChisel leaving unlabeled regions after clump growth (bug #52327).





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manager, you may download it from its webpage (link below) and build
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  http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html





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