[AstroPy] arbitrary coordinate systems and data cube slicing in APLpy

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

Over the last couple of months, I've made extensive changes to the
core APLpy code to allow us to support plotting of FITS files with
arbitrary coordinates rather than just sky coordinates, and to also
allow slicing of multi-dimensional data cubes. It is now very easy for
example to make position-velocity plots from a 3D FITS cube.

Due to the extensive nature of the changes, and before releasing a
stable release (0.9.7), I would like to request beta testers to try
installing the latest developer version of APLpy and try out the new
functionality. Since the under-the-hood changes even affect plotting
of normal 2D 'sky' images, I would also welcome volunteers to try
using the latest developer version of APLpy with your current scripts
to help diagnose any issues.

To install the latest developer version:

git clone git://github.com/aplpy/aplpy.git
cd aplpy
python setup.py install

I have written up a documentation page regarding arbitrary coordinate systems:

http://aplpy.github.com/documentation/arbitrary_coordinate_systems.html

as well as regarding slicing (in particular, check out the example):

http://aplpy.github.com/documentation/slicing.html

Please report any issues via GitHub:

https://github.com/aplpy/aplpy/issues

and if you need to send me any example files to reproduce issues, you
can send them to me at thomas.robitaille at gmail.com (data will be
treated as confidential).

Note that these updates supersede the userwcs branch of APLpy that was
created by Adam Ginsburg to support non-coordinate axes.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions regarding
this functionality, or suggestions for improving the documentation!

Cheers,
Tom