Gnuastro 0.13.93 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

I hope you enjoyed the year's holidays.

Since the previous alpha release, we received a lot of very useful
feedback, bugs and suggestions of improvements (resulting in +40
commits, see below for the full list of new features). Therefore we
are making a second alpha release now and will release Gnuastro 0.14
next week. Please let us know if you find any warnings, crashes or
unexpected behavior so we have a smoothly built Gnuastro 0.14 for
everyone.

The full list of new features since the previous alpha release is
available in [1] below. To summarize the most significant: 1) Some
parts of NoiseChisel's core algorithm has improved, resulting in
better quantile-thresholding and Sky estimations. 2) Statistics can
now create a 2D histogram of two table columns as a FITS image (very
useful to visualize the correlation of two columns in a table).

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

  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed):

40bf254b5c781d26e081e61a1a3b5e67  gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz
95da5f7330aa1d034c9d81ba130e86a56e7f381f  gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz

I am very grateful to Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani and Sachin Kumar Singh
for directly contributing to the source of Gnuastro since the last
alpha-release. I am also very grateful to Paul Eggert, Andrés
García-Serra Romero, Bruno Haible, Javier Licandro, Alberto Madrigal,
Carlos Morales Socorro and Francois Ochsenbein for their very useful
comments, suggestions and bug fixes that have now been implemented in
Gnuastro since the last alpha-release.

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

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.7
  Autoconf 2.70
  Automake 1.16.2
  Help2man 1.47.16
  ImageMagick 7.0.10-57
  Gnulib v0.1-4356-gb1268f22f
  Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-98-gefa6f20

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

Best wishes,
Mohammad

--
Postdoctoral research fellow,
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC),
Calle Vía Láctea, s/n, E38205,
San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.





[1] Noteworthy changes since Gnuastro 0.13.50 (released on November 12th 
2020):

** New features

  All programs:
   - It may happen that an image input is expected by a program, but a
     HEALpix grid (1D table column that represents the 2D spherical
     representation of datasets) is given. In this case, the programs
     will now will print a warning, suggesting to use the 'HPXcvt'
     command-line program, that is built as part of WCSLIB.

  Crop:
   --primaryimghdu: Write the final cropped image into the primary (or
     0-th) extension of the output FITS file, so the output only has
     one extension.

  Statistics:
   - 2D histograms can now be built as a FITS image with a linear WCS that
     contains axis values and box size. This allows using the power of FITS
     viewers for plotting/inspecting distributions of two columns in a
     table relative to each other (for example color-magnitude plots). You
     can also convert these 2D histogram images to PDF or JPEG with
     Gnuastro's ConvertType to directly use in your papers/reports (see the
     newly added "2D histogram as an image" section of the book for more).

  Library:
   - gal_binary_connected_adjacency_list: finding connected components
     without a square adjacency matrix (which can consume major RAM).
   - gal_dimension_dist_elliptical: Elliptical dist. of a point from 
center.
   - gal_fits_hdu_is_healpix: Return 1 if HDU is a HEALpix grid.
   - gal_fits_hdu_datasum: calculate DATASUM of given HDU in given FITS 
file.
   - gal_fits_hdu_datasum_ptr: calculate DATASUM of opened FITS file 
pointer.
   - gal_pointer_allocate_ram_or_mmap: allocate space either in RAM or as a
     memory-mapped file.
   - gal_pointer_mmap_free: "free" (actually delete) the memory-mapped 
file.
   - gal_wcs_create: create WCSLIB-compatible WCS from raw values.


 ** Changed features

  All programs:
   --interpnumngb: the default value has been increased to 15 (from 9). The
     reason for this is that we now have a more robust outlier removal
     algorithm (see description under "NoiseChisel & Statistics").

  Crop:
   - When cropping a single image in WCS mode, there is no longer any
     limitation on the WCS. Until now for all WCS mode crops, it was
     necessary for the WCS to be aligned to the celestial coordinates. But
     from this version, this is only necessary when cropping from many
     files (and stitching them together where necessary). For WCS-mode
     crops of a single image, any WCS that is recognized by WCSLIB is fine.

  Fits:
   - When printing FITS file HDU information (no options given), a new
     "Comments" column may be printed for each HDU in the end of the line.
     It will be printed if special situations are found (for example a 2D
     HEALPix grid, that is usually stored as a 1D array/column).

  NoiseChisel & Statistics:
   - New algorithm used to reject outlying tiles. In NoiseChisel this
     is done when estimating the quantile threshold, the
     pseudo-detection threshold and the final Sky value. In
     Statistics, its just the Sky value. Unlike the previous method
     that used the global distribution of tile values to identify
     outliers, the new algorithm uses a relative measure. Since
     outliers are now rejected more robustly, the default value of
     'outliersigma' has been decreased to '5' (previously it was
     10). See the book's "NoiseChisel changes after publication"
     section for more.

  Statistics:
   - The '--histogram2d' now takes a string argument: either 'image' or
     'table'. For the old behavior please use '--histogram2d=table'. See
     the new features above for the 'image' mode.

  Library:
   - gal_pointer_mmap_allocate: new name for 'gal_pointer_allocate_mmap'.
   - gal_threads_dist_in_threads: now accounts for billions of threads,
     thus includes memory management options.
   - gal_threads_spin_off: now accounts for memory management.


 ** Bugs fixed:
  bug #59400: CosmicCalculator fails --printparams when redshift isn't 
given.
  bug #59459: Unclear WCS when both PC and CD exist in input, but conflict.
  bug #59625: MakeProfiles uses last --kernel, if it is called more 
than once.
  bug #59700: Segment's excessive RAM usage when many clumps over a 
detection.
  bug #59765: MakeCatalog crash when to-be-subtracted Sky is a 
single-element
              per tile tessellation (e.g., NoiseChisel's 
'--oneelempertile').





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

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

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

  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz

If the command above doesn't work, you have to un-compress and un-pack
it with two separate commands (or use a pipe to feed the output of the
first into the second: `lzip -cd gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz | tar -xf -'):

  $ lzip -d gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar





[3] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify gnuastro-0.13.93-0bd0.tar.lz.sig

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

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 71E899012D174B66

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.