From chanley at stsci.edu Tue Mar 6 21:07:58 2007 From: chanley at stsci.edu (Christopher Hanley) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:07:58 -0500 Subject: [AstroPy] PyFITS 1.1 "candidate" RELEASE Message-ID: <45EE1E7E.4050900@stsci.edu> ------------------ | PYFITS Release | ------------------ Space Telescope Science Institute is pleased to announce the candidate release of PyFITS 1.1. This release includes support for both the NUMPY and NUMARRAY array packages. This software can be downloaded at: http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits/Download If you encounter bugs, please send bug reports to "help at stsci.edu". We intend to support NUMARRAY and NUMPY simultaneously for a transition period of no less than 6 months. Eventually, however, support for NUMARRAY will disappear. During this period, it is likely that new features will appear only for NUMPY. The support for NUMARRAY will primarily be to fix serious bugs and handle platform updates. ----------- | Version | ----------- Version 1.1rc1; March 6, 2007 ------------------------------- | Major Changes since v1.1b3 | ------------------------------- * The NUMPY version of PyFITS now supports FITS group data. * The NUMPY version of PyFITS now support variable length column tables. * Keyboard interrputs are now blocked during a file flush. * Many minor bug fixes. ------------------------- | Software Requirements | ------------------------- PyFITS Version 1.1rc1 REQUIRES: * Python 2.3 or later * NUMPY 1.0.1(or later) or NUMARRAY --------------------- | Installing PyFITS | --------------------- PyFITS 1.1rc1 is distributed as a Python distutils module. Installation simply involves unpacking the package and executing % python setup.py install to install it in Python's site-packages directory. Alternatively the command %python setup.py install --local="/destination/directory/" will install PyFITS in an arbitrary directory which should be placed on PYTHONPATH. Once numarray or numpy has been installed, then PyFITS should be available for use under Python. ----------------- | Download Site | ----------------- http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits/Download ---------- | Usage | ---------- Users will issue an "import pyfits" command as in the past. However, the use of the NUMPY or NUMARRAY version of PyFITS will be controlled by an environment variable called NUMERIX. Set NUMERIX to 'numarray' for the NUMARRAY version of PyFITS. Set NUMERIX to 'numpy' for the NUMPY version of pyfits. If only one array package is installed, that package's version of PyFITS will be imported. If both packages are installed the NUMERIX value is used to decide which version to import. If no NUMERIX value is set then the NUMARRAY version of PyFITS will be imported. Anything else will raise an exception upon import. --------------- | Bug Reports | --------------- Please send all PyFITS bug reports to help at stsci.edu ------------------ | Advanced Users | ------------------ Users who would like the "bleeding" edge of PyFITS can retrieve the software from our SUBVERSION repository hosted at: http://astropy.scipy.org/svn/pyfits/trunk We also provide a Trac site at: http://projects.scipy.org/astropy/pyfits/wiki From erwin at mpe.mpg.de Sun Mar 11 17:43:32 2007 From: erwin at mpe.mpg.de (Peter Erwin) Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:43:32 +0100 Subject: [AstroPy] Updated telarchive (Python tool for quick and dirty telescopy archive searches) Message-ID: Hi, This is an announcement of an updated version of my quick-and-dirty, Python-based telescope archive search tool. (A short summary of what it does is appended below.) New features (and fixes): Updated to work with SIMBAD 4, so coordinate lookup works again Assorted compatibility fixes with certain archives Updated to work with DR5 of SDSS Added searching of SMOKA (Subaru and other Japanese telescopes) Preliminary support for searching the Gemini Science Archive. New "defects": Searching the Isaac Newton Group Archive currently does not work, due to the fact that the archive interface is being upgraded and is thus in a state of flux. I have hopes that this will eventually settle down and HTML-based searching will be possible again. [previous summary, updated:] I've been working on a Python-based tool which people on this list might find useful. It's basically a command-line program which simplifies searching various public telescope archives to see if they might have data on a particular astronomical object or part of the sky. This includes the HST and general MAST archive, as well as the ESO, UKIRT, CFHT, and AAT ground-based archives, and Data Release 5 (DR5) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The NOAO Science Archive is also included, though it has very little publically available data at this point. Recent additions are SMOKA (the archive for Subaru and several older Japanese telescopes) and the Gemini Science Archive. The program won't *get* the data for you, of course, or even tell you very much about it -- for that, you still need to visit the individual archive web pages. But it will save you lots of clicking and typing in web-page forms if you just want to find out if there is *any* data available. An example (searching within a 2-arcminute box centered on the planetary nebula NGC 7027; searching on coordinates directly is also possible): $ telarchive "ngc 7027" 2.0 SIMBAD (France): Found object coordinates: RA = 21 07 01.59, Dec = +42 14 10.2 Searching archives for ngc 7027 (RA = 21 07 01.593, dec = +42 14 10.18), with search box = 2.0 arcmin... ING Archive: No data found. Sloan Digital Sky Survey (DR5) SQL Search: No data found. NOAO Science Archive: No data found. AAT Archive: No data found. UKIRT Archive: Data exists! ("A total of 943 were retrieved") CFHT Archive: Data exists! ("A total of 213 records were retrieved") ESO Archive: No data found. HST Archive (at ESO): Data exists! ("A total of 84 were found") -- 6 WFPC2, 24 WF, 1 PC, 13 NICMOS, 3 FOC, 24 STIS, 13 FOS Multimission Archive at STScI (MAST): Data exists! FUSE (2); IUE (34); COPERNICUS (1); GALEX (29) Gemini Science Archive: Data exists! ("A total of 45 records were retrieved") SMOKA (Subaru Mitaka Okayama Kiso Archive): Data exists! ("699 frames are found.") 349 images and 350 spectra Subaru -- OHS/CISCO (9), Subaru -- IRCS (5), Subaru -- COMICS (331), Kiso -- 1k CCD (3), Kiso -- 2k CCD (1), Subaru -- OHS/CISCO (29), Subaru -- IRCS (6), Subaru -- COMICS (281), Okayama -- SNG (3), Okayama -- HIDES (31) It's available as a gzipped tar file here: http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~erwin/code/ There are installation instructions/suggestions in the README file. (And feel free to email with questions or suggestions about it!) cheers, Peter -- ============================================================= Peter Erwin Max-Planck-Insitute for Extraterrestrial erwin at mpe.mpg.de Physics, Giessenbachstrasse tel. +49 (0)89 30000 3695 85748 Garching, Germany fax +49 (0)89 30000 3495 http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~erwin