From aldcroft at head.cfa.harvard.edu Sun Feb 13 23:28:50 2011 From: aldcroft at head.cfa.harvard.edu (Tom Aldcroft) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:28:50 -0500 Subject: [AstroPy] asciitable 0.5.1 Message-ID: I'd like to announce the release of version 0.5.1 of asciitable, an extensible module for reading and writing ASCII tables. This release is primarily an update to the CDS format reader with code contributed by Prasanth Haridas Nair. It now can handle separate ReadMe and data files. The ReadMe file specifies the column information for one or more associated data files. Please see: http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/contrib/asciitable/#asciitable.Cds In addition a minor bug was fixed where blank table lines were not being properly ignored. Regards, Tom Aldcroft From J.P.Terlouw at astro.rug.nl Tue Feb 15 09:04:32 2011 From: J.P.Terlouw at astro.rug.nl (Hans Terlouw) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:04:32 +0100 Subject: [AstroPy] Kapteyn Package 2.1 released Message-ID: <4D5A87F0.20902@astro.rug.nl> We would like to announce the release of version 2.1 of the Kapteyn Package, a collection of Python modules developed by the computer group of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Some of the package's features: - Classes for the handling of spatial and spectral coordinates, WCS projections and transformations between different sky systems. Spectral translations (e.g. between frequencies and velocities) are supported as well as mixed coordinates. For WCS, Dr. Mark Calabretta's WCSLIB 4.7 is used. WCSLIB is integrated in the package and need not be installed separately. - Tools for writing small applications for the display and interactive inspection of (FITS) data and for the creation of plots with world coordinate information, including all-sky plots. A unique feature is the possibility to make plots with mixed coordinates, e.g. where one axis is spatial and the other one is spectral. Matplotlib and PyFITS are used. - Utilities for use with Matplotlib such as obtaining coordinate information from plots, interactively modifiable colormaps and timer events (to facilitate movie loops). - A class for the efficient reading, writing and manipulating of simple table-like structures in text files. New features: - A class for plotting shapes like ellipses, rectangles and regular polygons. For these shapes angles and distances along a great circle are preserved. This class can be used for example to draw footprints on all-sky plots or a beam to show the resolution of an instrument. - Support for RGB-coded images. - A class containing a function for estimating gaussian components in a profile. These estimates could subsequently be used as initial estimates for a least squares fit. - and, of course, many smaller improvements and some bugfixes. Currently supported architectures are Linux, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Extensive documentation, including tutorial and background information, as well as download and installation instructions can be found at http://www.astro.rug.nl/software/kapteyn/ -- J. P. Terlouw Kapteyn Astronomical Institute University of Groningen Postbus 800 NL-9700 AV Groningen The Netherlands Phone: +31-(0)50-3634068/73 Fax: +31-(0)50-3636100