Full Changelog

Version 6.0.0 (2023-11-25)

New Features

astropy.config

• The new ConfigNamespace.help() method provides a convenient way to get information about configuration items. [#13499]

astropy.coordinates

• Support has been added to create geodetic representations not just for existing ellipsoids from ERFA, but also with explicitly provided values, by defining a subclass of BaseGeodeticRepresentation with the equatorial radius and flattening assigned to _equatorial_radius and _flattening attributes. [#14763]

• Add BaseBodycentricRepresentation, a new spheroidal representation for bodycentric latitudes and longitudes. [#14851]

• Support Numpy broadcasting over frame data and attributes. [#15121]

astropy.cosmology

• Registered a latex writer for exporting a Cosmology object to a LaTex table. [#14701]

• Added argument rename to Cosmology’s I/O, allowing for input and output symbols to be renamed. [#14780]

• All non-abstract Cosmology subclasses are now automatically registered to work with Astropy’s YAML serialization. [#14979]

• Cosmology I/O now auto-identifies the ‘.tex’ suffix with the ‘ascii.latex’ format. [#15088]

• The Cosmology class now has a new property to access the parameters of the cosmology: .parameters. This property return a read-only dictionary of all the non-derived parameter values on the cosmology object. When accessed from the class (not an instance) the dictionary contains Parameter instances, not the values. [#15168]

• The field default has been added to Parameter. This can be used to introspect the default value of a parameter on a cosmology class e.g. LambdaCDM.H0.default. [#15400]

astropy.io.fits

• Add new option decompress_in_memory to fits.open, to decompress the whole file in memory at once, instead of decompressing the file progressively as data is needed. Default behavior is better for memory usage but sometimes slow, especially for files with many small HDUs. [#15501]

astropy.io.votable

• Add support for Parquet serialization of VOTables. Writing of this serialization is available with using the new 'votable.parquet' format. [#15281]

• Added MIVOT feature through the MivotBlock class that allows model annotations reading and writing in VOTable. [#15390]

astropy.modeling

• Added a GeneralSersic2D model that can have “boxy” or “disky” isophotes. [#15545]

astropy.nddata

• A more flexible and/or compact string representation is now available for NDData objects which visually indicates masked entries, and provides for better for dask array support. [#14438]

astropy.table

• The new Row.get() method, analogous to dict.get(), returns the value of the specified column from the row if the column present, otherwise it returns a fallback value, which by default is None. [#14878]

astropy.time

• Masked Time instances now use astropy’s own Masked class internally. This means that Masked input is now properly recognized, and that masks get propagated also to Quantity output (such as from a TimeDelta converted to a unit of time), creating MaskedQuantity instances. [#15231]

• Added a TimeDelta format quantity_str that represents the time delta as a string with one or more Quantity components. This format provides a human-readable multi-scale string representation of a time delta. The default output sub-format is not considered stable in this release, please see astropy/astropy#15485 for more information. [#15264]

astropy.uncertainty

• Uncertainty Distribution now support structured data types, and as a result it now works also with EarthLocation. [#15304]

• Uncertainty Distribution can now be used inside representations, which also allows basic support in SkyCoord. While most calculations work, there are remaining issues. For instance, the repr does not show that the coordinates are distributions. [#15395]

astropy.units

• Add support for gc2gde and gd2gce erfa functions to allow geodetic representations using equatorial radius and flattening. [#14729]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData default dictionary can now be set with the default_factory keyword argument. [#15265]

• astropy.utils.decorators.deprecated now adds the __deprecated__ attribute to the objects it wraps, following the practice in https://peps.python.org/pep-0702/. [#15310]

astropy.visualization

• Add WCSAxes.text_coord method to print text using SkyCoord objects parallel to plotting data points with WCSAxes.plot_coord. [#14661]

astropy.wcs

• Support WCS descriptions of basic planetary coordinate frames. [#14820]

• Updated bundled WCSLIB version to 8.1. This update adds support planetary keywords A_RADIUS, B_RADIUS, C_RADIUS, BLON_OBS, BLAT_OBS, and BDIS_OBS in auxprm and adds wcsprm::time to the wcsprm struct to record the TIME axis. This update also includes several bug fixes. For a full list of changes - see http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/CHANGES [#15035]

API Changes

astropy.config

• Removed deprecated ConfigurationMissingWarning class and update_default_config function; There are no replacements as they should no be used anymore. [#15466]

astropy.convolution

• Invalid kernel arithmetic operations now raise a KernelArithmeticError instead of a bare Exception. [#14728]

• Added base KernelError error class and removed DiscretizationError error class (a ValueError will be raised instead). [#14732]

• discretize_model will now raise a ValueError if mode='oversample' and factor does not have an integer value. [#14794]

astropy.coordinates

• Removed deprecated angle parsing and formatting utilities from angle_utilities. Use the functions from angle_formats instead. [#14675]

• The deprecated functionality of initializing Angle or Longitude from a tuple is no longer supported. [#15205]

• Angle-related classes and functions have been moved within astropy.coordinates. There is no change to public API as everything moved should still be imported from astropy.coordinates, not a sub-module. If you are using private API, try importing from astropy.coordinates instead. If you need something that has been moved and is not available in astropy.coordinates, please open an issue on the Astropy issue tracker. [#15220]

• It is no longer possible to pass frame classes to the transform_to() method of a low-level coordinate-frame class. It is still possible to pass frame instances. The transform_to() method of the high-level SkyCoord class is unaffected. [#15500]

astropy.cosmology

• Removed support of importing private constants and functions from astropy.cosmology.flrw. [#14672]

• Removed deprecated Cosmology Parameter argument fmt. [#14673]

• Removed deprecated vectorize_if_needed and inf_like from cosmology.utils. [#14677]

• Removed deprecated import paths from astropy.cosmology.core. [#14782]

• Cosmology Parameter is now a dataclass, and can work with all of Python’s dataclasses machinery, like field introspection and type conversion. [#14874]

• A new property – scale_factor0 – has been added to Cosmology objects. This is the scale factor at redshift 0, and is defined to be 1.0. [#14931]

• Added registration label ascii.latex to Cosmology IO. [#14938]

• The private module astropy.cosmology.utils has been deprecated. [#14980]

• Removed deprecated get_cosmology_from_string class method in default_cosmology; use get instead. [#15467]

astropy.io.ascii

• Several arguments in functions within astropy.io.ascii have been deprecated and are either renamed or scheduled to be removed.

  read(): - Reader will be removed. Instead supply the equivalent format argument. - Inputter has been renamed to inputter_cls. - Outputter has been renamed to outputter_cls.

  get_reader(): - Reader has been renamed to reader_cls. - Inputter has been renamed to inputter_cls. - Outputter has been renamed to outputter_cls.

  write(): - Writer will be removed. Instead supply the equivalent format argument.

  get_writer(): - Writer has been renamed to writer_cls. [#14914]

• Removed deprecated astropy.io.ascii.tests.common.raises test helper; use pytest.raises instead. [#15470]

astropy.io.fits

• Deprecate _ExtensionHDU and _NonstandardExtHDU (use ExtensionHDU or NonstandardExtHDU instead). [#15396]

• Remove special handling of TCTYP TCUNI TCRPX TCRVL TCDLT TRPOS (#7157). [#15396]

• Rename and deprecate TableHDU.update to TableHDU.update_header, for consistency with ImageHDU. [#15396]

astropy.io.misc

• Removed deprecated astropy.io.misc.asdf subpackage. Use asdf-astropy package instead. [#14668]

• fnunpickle and fnpickle are deprecated because they are not used anywhere within astropy. If you must, use the module from Python standard library but be advised that pickle is insecure so you should only unpickle data that you trust. [#15418]

astropy.io.votable

• Removed deprecated pedantic option from the astropy.io.votable.table.parse() function and the corresponding configuration setting. Use the verify option instead. [#14669]

• Class astropy.io.votable.tree.Table has been renamed to TableElement to avoid sharing the name with astropy.table.Table. [#15372]

• Fully removed support for version = ‘1.0’ on VOTableFile__init__() and changed its tests to check correctly. It was raising a DeprecationWarning and now is raising a ValueError. [#15490]

astropy.modeling

• Removed the AliasDict class from modeling.utils. [#12943]

• Creating a model instance with parameters that have incompatible shapes will now raise a ValueError rather than an IncompatibleShapeError. [#15209]

• Removal of deprecated code _model_to_fit_params and _fitter_to_model_params from fitting.py. [#15461]

astropy.stats

• The BoxLeastSquares, BoxLeastSquaresResults and LombScargle classes are not available from astropy.stats anymore, they are now available only from astropy.timeseries. [#15530]

astropy.tests

• Removed deprecated deprecation, warning, and exception handling functionality provided by astropy.tests.helper. [#14670]

• astropy.tests.command.FixRemoteDataOption and astropy.tests.command.AstropyTest are deprecated. They are no longer necessary after sunsetting astropy-helpers. [#15204]

astropy.time

• Time has switched to use Masked arrays internally, instead of indicating masked values using NaN in the internal jd2 attribute. As a result, any output from instances, such as one gets with, say, the .isot format, will also use Masked by default.

  For backwards compatibility, a new configuration item, astropy.time.conf.masked_array_type is introduced which is set to “astropy” by default (which indicates one wants to use Masked), but can also be set to “numpy”, in which case numpy.ma.MaskedArray will be used where possible (essentially, for all but Quantity). [#15231]

• Changed the TimeDelta init signature to be consistent with that of Time. Previously the argument order was val, val2, format, scale, copy. Now the order is val, val2, format, scale, *, precision, in_subfmt, out_subfmt, copy, where the arguments after the * must be specified by keyword. [#15264]

astropy.timeseries

• Removed deprecated midpoint_epoch in fold function; use epoch_time instead. [#15462]

astropy.uncertainty

• The .dtype attribute exposed by Distribution is now that of the samples, rather than one that has a “samples” entry. This makes quantities with structured data types and units easier to support, and generally makes the Distribution appear more similar to regular arrays. It should have little effect on code. For instance, distribution["samples"] still will return the actual distribution.

  As a consequence of this refactoring, most arrays that are not C-contiguous can now be viewed and will thus not be copied on input any more. The only exceptions are arrays for which the strides are negative.

  Note that the true data type is considered an implementation detail. But for reference, it now is a structured data type with a single field, “samples”, which itself is an array of “sample” fields, which contain the actual data. [#15304]

astropy.units

• Like np.ndarray, under numpy 2.0 Quantity and all its subclasses (Angle, Masked, etc.) will no longer support the .ptp() method. Use np.ptp(...) instead.

  Similarly, support for the much less frequently used .newbyteorder() and .itemset() methods has been removed. [#15378]

• The following deprecated functionality has been removed:

  • littleh unit and with_H0 equivalency. They are still available from cosmology.units.

  • brightness_temperature equivalency no longer automatically swaps the order of its arguments if it does not match the expectation.

  • PhysicalType no longer supports str methods and attributes. [#15514]

astropy.utils

• Removed deprecated OrderedDescriptor, OrderedDescriptorContainer, and set_locale in astropy.utils.misc. [#14679]

• is_path_hidden() and walk_skip_hidden() are deprecated. [#14759]

• The structure of utils.metadata has been refactored, but all the available functions and classes are still present and should be imported as before. [#15166]

• The astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData class, which is used throughout astropy to carry metadata on tables, columns, etc., can now also be used on dataclasses.

  When accessing the meta attribute on a class astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData now returns None instead of itself. [#15237]

• The astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData class, which is used throughout astropy to carry metadata on tables, columns, etc., can now also be used on frozen dataclasses. [#15404]

• Removed deprecated version_path in minversion function; it is no longer used. [#15468]

astropy.visualization

• The bboxes, ticklabels_bbox, and tick_out_size arguments to astropy.visualization.wcaxes.ticklabels.TickLabels.draw() now have no effect and are deprecated. This is to allow rasterized ticks to be drawn correctly on WCSAxes. [#14760]

• It is now not possible to pass any keyword arguments to astropy.visualization.wcsaxes.WCSAxes.draw(). Previously passing any keyword arguments would have errored anyway, as matplotlib.axes.Axes.draw() does not accept keyword arguments. [#14772]

• Deprecated the exp attribute in the LogStretch, InvertedLogStretch, PowerDistStretch, and InvertedPowerDistStretch stretch classes, and the power attribute in the PowerStretch. Instead, use the a attribute, which matches the input keyword. [#15538]

• Removed the maximum value of the a parameter in the AsinhStretch and SinhStretch stretch classes. [#15539]

astropy.wcs

• Removed deprecated accuracy from all_world2pix method in WCS; use tolerance instead. [#15464]

• NoConvergence no longer accepts arbitrary keyword arguments. [#15504]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed minor bug when getting solar system positions of objects from Type 3 SPICE kernel files. [#15612]

astropy.cosmology

• The exponent in w0wzCDM.de_density_scale has been corrected to 3, from -3. This correction has also been made to the scalar inv_efunc cpython functions. [#14991]

• pandas.Series are now uniformly converted to their underlying data type when given as an argument to a Cosmology method. [#15600]

astropy.io.fits

• Reading a table from FITS now respects the TNULL property of a column, passing it into the column’s fill_value. [#14723]

• Fix crash when a PrimaryHDU has a GROUPS keyword with a non-boolean value (i.e. not a random-groups HDU). [#14998]

• Fixed a bug that caused Cutout2D to not work correctly with CompImageHDU.section [#14999]

• Fixed a bug that caused compressed images with TFORM missing the optional ‘1’ prefix to not be readable. [#15001]

• Ensure that tables written to FITS with both masked and unmasked columns roundtrip properly (previously, all integer columns would become masked if any column was masked). [#15473]

• Fix segfault with error report in tile decompression. [#15489]

astropy.io.votable

• Output of repr for VOTable instance now clearly shows it is a VOTable and not generic astropy Table. [#14702]

astropy.modeling

• All models can be pickled now. [#14902]

astropy.nddata

• Restore bitmask propagation behavior in NDData.mask, plus a fix for arithmetic between masked and unmasked NDData objects. [#14995]

astropy.table

• Table.as_array now respects the fill_value property of masked columns. [#14723]

• Fix a bug where table indexes were not using a stable sort order. This was causing the order of rows within groups to not match the original table order when an indexed table was grouped. [#14907]

• Fixed issue #14964 that when grouping a Table on a mixin column such as Quantity or Time, the grouped table keys did not reflect the original column values. For Quantity this meant that the key values were pure float values without the unit, while for Time the key values were the pair of jd1 and jd2 float values. [#14966]

astropy.time

• Ensure that the Time caches of formats and scales do not get out of sync with the actual data, even if another instance, holding a view of the data is written to. E.g., if one does t01 = t[:2], and sets t[0] after, it is now guaranteed that t01.value will correctly reflect that change in value. [#15453]

astropy.units

• In VOunits, “pix”, “au”, “a”, and “ct” are removed from the list of deprecated units. [#14885]

astropy.utils

• Ufuncs with more than 2 operands (such as erfa.dtf2d) now work also if all inputs are scalars and more than two inputs have masks. [#15450]

• Ensured that str(masked_array) looks like str(unmasked_array) also for array scalars. Thus, like regular array scalars, the precision is ignored for float, and strings do not include extra quoting. [#15451]

astropy.visualization

• The location of ticklabels on a WCSAxes is now correctly calculated when the figure is rasterized. [#14760]

• Fixed a bug where a ValueError would be raised in the AsinhStretch and SinhStretch classes for valid a parameter values. [#15539]

astropy.wcs

• wcs.validate(filename) now properly closes the file handler. [#15054]

• Fix a regression in custom WCS mapping due to the recent introduction of Solar System frames. [#15630]

Other Changes and Additions

• The minimum supported version of NumPy is now 1.22. [#15006]

• Moved International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) and Leap Second files out into standalone astropy-iers-data package, maintaining full backward-compatibility in the astropy.utils.iers API. Deprecation warnings may be issued when certain files are accessed directly. [#14819]

• Switch from using setup.cfg for project configuration to using pyproject.toml. [#15247]

• Update bundled expat to 2.5.0. [#15585]

Version 5.3.4 (2023-10-03)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.misc

• Updated astropy.io.misc.yaml so dump()` with a numpy object array or ``load() with YAML representing a Numpy object array both raise TypeError. This prevents problems like a segmentation fault. [#15373]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed a bug in convert_to_writable_filelike where GzipFile was not closed properly. [#15359]

astropy.units

• In VOUnit, the spaces around the slash were removed in the formatting of fractions, and fractional powers now also use the “**” operator. [#15282]

• We now ensure that the unit u.cgs.cm is just an alias of u.si.cm, instead of a redefinition. This ensures that u.Unit("cm") / u.cm will reliably cancel to dimensionless (instead of some “cm / cm”). [#15368]

astropy.utils

• For Masked, np.ptp and the .ptp() method now properly account for the mask, ensuring the result is identical to subtracting the maximum and minimum (with the same arguments). [#15380]

Other Changes and Additions

• Compatibility with Python 3.12. [#14784]

• Replaced the URL of IETF_LEAP_SECOND_URL because the original is now defunct and IETF now defers to IANA for such look-up. [#15421]

Version v5.3.3 (2023-09-07)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• TransformGraph.to_dot_graph() now throws an exception for invalid savelayout.

astropy.cosmology

• The exponent of w0wzCDM functions in inv_efunc has been corrected to 3, from -3. [#15224]

astropy.modeling

• Astropy modeling can filter non-finite data values using the filter_non_finite keyword argument in a fitter call. Now when filter_non_finite is True, non-finite weights will also be filtered to prevent crashes in LevMarLSQFitter. [#15215]

astropy.units

• Fixed astropy.units.Quantity’s implementation of numpy.nanmedian(), where for Numpy >= 1.25 an exception was raised for some array shapes and axis combinations. [#15228]

Other Changes and Additions

• v5.3.x will not support NumPy 2.0 or later. [#15234]

Version 5.3.2 (2023-08-11)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed import when called with Python -OO flag. [#15037]

astropy.nddata

• Fix for collapse operations on NDData without masks or units. [#15082]

astropy.units

• Modified the implementation of np.power() for instances of Quantity to allow any array as the second operand if all its elements have the same value. [#15101]

Version 5.3.1 (2023-07-06)

Bug Fixes

astropy.cosmology

• The exponent in wowzCDM.de_density_scale has been corrected to 3, from -3. [#14991]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix crash when a PrimaryHDU has a GROUPS keyword with a non-boolean value (i.e. not a random-groups HDU). [#14998]

• Fixed a bug that caused Cutout2D to not work correctly with CompImageHDU.section [#14999]

• Fixed a bug that caused compressed images with TFORM missing the optional ‘1’ prefix to not be readable. [#15001]

astropy.modeling

• All models can be pickled now. [#14902]

astropy.nddata

• Restore bitmask propagation behavior in NDData.mask, plus a fix for arithmetic between masked and unmasked NDData objects. [#14995]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug where table indexes were not using a stable sort order. This was causing the order of rows within groups to not match the original table order when an indexed table was grouped. [#14907]

astropy.units

• In VOunits, “pix”, “au”, “a”, and “ct” are removed from the list of deprecated units. [#14885]

Version 5.3 (2023-05-22)

New Features

astropy.coordinates

• Add optional parameter refresh_cache to EarthLocation.of_site() and EarthLocation.get_site_names() to force the download of the latest site registry. [#13993]

• Added atol argument to function is_O3 and is_rotation in matrix utilities. [#14371]

• A new class astropy.coordinates.StokesCoord has been added to represent world coordinates describing polarization state. This change introduces a breaking change to the return value of astropy.wcs.WCS.pixel_to_world where before a u.Quantity object would be returned containing numerical values representing a Stokes profile now a StokesCoord object is returned. The previous numerical values can be accessed with StokesCoord.value. [#14482]

• Add an optional parameter location to EarthLocation.get_itrs() to allow the generation of topocentric ITRS coordinates with respect to a specific location. [#14628]

astropy.cosmology

• Two new cosmologies have been added, FlatwpwaCDM and Flatw0wzCDM, which are the flat variants of wpwaCDM and w0wzCDM, respectively. [#12353]

astropy.io.ascii

• Add ability to read and write an RST (reStructuredText) ASCII table that includes additional header rows specifying any or all of the column dtype, unit, format, and description. This is available via the new header_rows keyword argument. [#14182]

astropy.io.fits

• Added support for >3D data in CompImageHDU [#14252]

• Added a CompImageHDU.section property which can be used to efficiently access subsets of the data, similarly to ImageHDU.section. When using this, only the tiles required to cover the section are read from disk and decompressed. [#14353]

• Added support for 'NOCOMPRESS' for the compression_type option in CompImageHDU. [#14408]

• Added new properties compression_type and tile_shape on CompImageHDU, giving the name of the compression algorithm and the shape of the tiles in the tiled compression respectively. [#14428]

• Do not call gc.collect() when closing a CompImageHDU object as it has a large performance penalty. [#14576]

• VLA tables can now be written with the unified I/O interface. When object types are present or the VLA contains different types a TypeError is thrown. [#14578]

astropy.io.misc

• Add support for writing/reading fixed-size and variable-length array columns to the parquet formatter. [#14237]

astropy.io.votable

• Added a method get_infos_by_name to make it easier to implement DALI-compliant protocols [#14212]

• Updating the built-in UCD list to upstream 1.5 (which requires a minor update to the parser) [#14554]

astropy.modeling

• Enable check for poorly conditioned fits in LinearLSQFitter for polynomial models with fixed inputs. [#14037]

astropy.nddata

• astropy.nddata.NDDataArray now has collapsing methods like sum, mean, min, and max which operate along any axes, and better support for astropy.utils.Masked objects. [#14175]

astropy.stats

• vonmisesmle has now functioning “weights” and “axis” parameters that work equivalently to the rest of the functions in the circstats module (circmean, rayleightest, etc.) [#14533]

astropy.table

• Table and QTable can now use the | and |= operators for dictionary-style merge and update. [#14187]

astropy.time

• Add a leap_second_strict argument to the Time.to_datetime() method. This controls the behavior when converting a time within a leap second to the datetime format and can take the values raise (the default), warn, or silent. [#14606]

astropy.timeseries

• Adds the astropy.timeseries.LombScargleMultiband class, which is an extension of the astropy.timeseries.LombScargle class. It enables the generation of periodograms for datasets with measurements taken in more than one photometric band. [#14016]

• Add unit_parse_strict parameter to the Kepler reader to control the warnings emitted when reading files. [#14294]

astropy.units

• Add support for degrees Celsius for FITS. Parsing “Celsius” and “deg C” is now supported and astropy will output “Celsius” into FITS.

  Note that “deg C” is only provided for compatibility with existing FITS files, as it does not conform to the normal unit standard, where this should be read as “degree * Coulomb”. Indeed, compound units like “deg C kg-1” will still be parsed as “Coulomb degree per kilogram”. [#14042]

• Enabled the equal_nan keyword argument for np.array_equal() when the arguments are astropy.units.Quantity instances. [#14135]

• Allow “console” and “unicode” formats for conversion to string of function units. [#14407]

• Add a “fraction” options to all the unit format classes, which determine whether, if a unit has bases raised to a negative power, a string representation should just show the negative powers (fraction=False) or use a fraction, and, in the latter case, whether to use a single-line representation using a solidus (fraction='inline' or fraction=True) or, if the format supports it, a multi-line presentation with the numerator and denominator separated by a horizontal line (fraction='multiline'). [#14449]

astropy.utils

• The mean method on NDDataArray now avoids a division by zero warning when taking the mean of a fully-masked slice (and still returns np.nan). [#14341]

• Ensure we can read the newer IERS_B files produced by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, and point astropy.utils.iers.IERS_B_URL to the new location. [#14382]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• get_moon() is deprecated and may be removed in a future version of astropy. Calling get_moon(...) should be replaced with get_body("moon", ...). [#14354]

astropy.io.fits

• Deprecate the auto-fixing of tile sizes for HCOMPRESS_1 tiled image compression when the tile size could be changed by +1 to make it acceptable. [#14410]

• The tile_size= argument to CompImageHDU has been deprecated as it was confusing that it was required to be in the opposite order to the data shape (it was in header rather than Numpy order). Instead, users should make use of the tile_shape= argument which is in Numpy shape order. [#14428]

astropy.modeling

• Deprecate the humlicek2 method for Voigt1D in favor of using the wofz method using the scipy.special.wofz implementation of the Fadeeva function whenever scipy is installed. [#14013]

• Deprecated astropy.modeling.utils.comb() function in favor of comb() from math standard library. [#14038]

• Propagate measurement uncertainties via the weights keyword argument into the parameter covariances. [#14519]

astropy.units

• The conversion of astropy.units.Quantity to bool that was deprecated since astropy 3.0 now raises a ValueError. This affects statements like if quantity. Use explicit comparisons like if quantity.value != 0 or if quantity is not None instead. [#14124]

• Operations on Quantity in tables are sped up by only copying info when it makes sense (i.e., when the object can still logically be thought of as the same, such as in unit changes or slicing). info is no longer copied if a Quantity is part of an operation. [#14253]

• The Quantity.nansum method has been deprecated. It was always weird that it was present, since ndarray does not have a similar method, and the other nan* functions such as nanmean did not have a corresponding method. Use np.nansum(quantity) instead. [#14267]

• The unused units.format.Unscaled format class has been deprecated. [#14417]

• The order in which unit bases are displayed has been changed to match the order bases are stored in internally, which is by descending power to which the base is raised, and alphabetical after. This helps avoid monstrosities like beam^-1 Jy for format='fits'.

  Note that this may affect doctests that use quantities with complicated units. [#14439]

astropy.utils

• For Masked instances, the where argument for any ufunc can now also be masked (with any masked elements masked in the output as well). This is not very useful in itself, but avoids problems in conditional functions (like np.add(ma, 1, where=ma>10)). [#14590]

astropy.visualization

• The pixel attribute of astropy.visualization.wcsaxes.frame.Spine is deprecated and will be removed in a future astropy version. Because it is (in general) not possible to correctly calculate pixel coordinates before Matplotlib is drawing a figure, instead set the world or data coordinates of the Spine using the appropriate setters. [#13989]

• Passing a bare number as the coord_wrap argument to CoordinateHelper.set_coord_type is deprecated. Pass a Quantity with units equivalent to angular degrees instead.

  The .coord_wrap attribute of CoordinateHelper is now a Quantity instead of a bare number. [#14050]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Angle.to_string() was changed to ensure it matches the behaviour of Quantity.to_string() in having a space between the value and the unit for display with non-degree and hourangle units (i.e., the case in which units are displayed by their name; the sexagesimal case for degrees or hourangle that uses symbols is not changed). [#14379]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix an issue in the io.ascii QDP format reader to allow lower-case commands in the table data file. Previously it required all upper case in order to parse QDP files. [#14365]

astropy.io.fits

• Compressing/decompressing a floating point dataset containing NaN values will no longer read in the whole tile as NaNs.

  Fixed segmentation faults that occurred when compressing/decompressing data with the PLIO_1 algorithm. [#14252]

• Card now uses the default Python representation for floating point values. [#14508]

• ImageHDU now properly rejects Numpy scalars, avoiding data corruption. [#14528]

• Fix issues with double quotes in CONTINUE cards. [#14598]

• Fixes an issue where FITS_rec was incorrectly raising a ValueError exception when the heapsize was greater than 2**31 when the Column type was ‘Q’ instead of ‘P’. [#14810]

astropy.io.misc

• Columns with big-endian byte ordering (such as those read in from a FITS table) can now be serialized with Parquet. [#14373]

astropy.modeling

• Bugfix for using getter/setter in properties to adjust the internal (computational) value of a property vs its external proxy value when the values involve units. [#14512]

• Fix issue with filter_non_finite option when fitting with weights via passing the weights through the non-finite-filter alongside the input data. [#14695]

• Fixed an issue with Parameter where a getter could be input without a setter (or vice versa). [#14708]

astropy.time

• Using quantities with units of time for Time format ‘decimalyear’ will now raise an error instead of converting the quantity to days and then interpreting the value as years. An error is raised instead of attempting to interpret the unit as years, since the interpretation is ambiguous: in ‘decimaltime’ years are equal to 365 or 366 days, while for regular time units the year is defined as 365.25 days. [#14566]

astropy.uncertainty

• Ensure that Distribution can be compared with == and != with regular arrays or scalars, and that inplace operations like dist[dist<0] *= -1 work. [#14421]

astropy.units

• Modified astropy.units.Quantity.__array_ufunc__() to return NotImplemented instead of raising a ValueError if the inputs are incompatible. [#13977]

• Modified the behavior of numpy.array_equal() and numpy.array_equiv() to return False instead of raising an error if their arguments are astropy.units.Quantity instances with incompatible units. [#14163]

• Spaces have been regularized for the unicode and console output formats: no extraneous spaces in front of the unit, and always a space between a possible scale factor and the unit. [#14413]

• Prefixed degrees and arcmin are now typeset without using the symbol in latex and unicode formats (i.e., mdeg instead of m°), as was already the case for arcsec. [#14419]

• Ensure the unit is kept in np.median even if the result is a scalar nan (the unit was lost for numpy < 1.22). [#14635]

• Ensure that Quantity with structured dtype can be set using non-structured Quantity (if units match), and that structured dtype names are inferred correctly in the creation of StructuredUnit, thus avoiding mismatches when setting units. [#14680]

astropy.utils

• When using astropy in environments with sparse file systems (e.g., where the temporary directory and astropy data directory resides in different volumes), os.rename may fail with OSError: [Errno 18] Invalid cross-device link. This may affect some clean-up operations executed by the data module, causing them to fail. This patch is to catch OSError with errno == EXDEV (i.e., Errno 18) when performing these operations and try to use shutil.move instead to relocate the data. [#13730]

• Ensure masks are propagated correctly for outer methods of ufuncs also if one of the inputs is not actually masked. [#14624]

astropy.visualization

• The location of a astropy.visualization.wcsaxes.frame.Spine in a plot is now correctly calculated when the DPI of a figure changes between a WCSAxes being created and the figure being drawn. [#13989]

• CoordinateHelper.set_ticks() now accepts number=0. Previously it errored. [#14160]

• WCSAxes.plot_coord and plot_scatter now work correctly for APE 14 compliant WCSes where the units are not always converted to degrees. [#14251]

• Fixed a bug where coordinate overlays did not automatically determine the longitude wrap angle or the appropriate units. [#14326]

astropy.wcs

• Fix bugs with high-level WCS API on wcs.WCS object when using -TAB coordinates. [#13571]

• Fixed a bug in how WCS handles PVi_ja header coefficients when CTYPE has -SIP suffix and in how code detects TPV distortions. [#14295]

Other Changes and Additions

• The minimum supported version of Python is now 3.9, changing from 3.8. [#14286]

• The minimum supported version of Numpy is now 1.21. [#14349]

• The minimum supported version of matplotlib is now 3.3. [#14286, #14321]

• astropy no longer publishes wheels for i686 architecture. [#14517]

• Added a pre-commit configuration for codespell. [#13985]

• Removed a large fraction of the bundled CFITSIO code and internally refactored FITS compression-related code, which has resulted in a speedup when compiling astropy from source (40% faster in some cases). [#14252]

• The CFITSIO library is no longer bundled in full with astropy and the option to build against an external installation of CFITSIO has now been removed, so the ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_CFITSIO environment variable will be ignored during building. [#14311]

• Updated CDS URL for Sesame look-up as the old URL is deprecated. [#14681]

Version 5.2.2 (2023-03-28)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• CDS and MRT tables with units that contain with multiple divisions, such as km/s/Mpc now parse correctly as being equal to km/(s.Mpc). [#14369]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix FITSDiff when table contains a VLA column with the Q type. [#14539]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug when creating a QTable when a Quantity input column is present and the units argument modifies the unit of that column. This now works as expected where previously this caused an exception. [#14357]

astropy.units

• CDS units with multiple divisions, such as km/s/Mpc now parse correctly as being equal to km/(s.Mpc). [#14369]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed a bug that caused subclasses of BaseHighLevelWCS and HighLevelWCSMixin to not work correctly under certain conditions if they did not have world_n_dim and pixel_n_dim defined on them. [#14495]

Version 5.2.1 (2023-01-06)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fix to ITRS frame earth_location attribute to give the correct result for a topocentric frame. [#14180]

astropy.cosmology

• Bounds are no longer passed to the scipy minimizer for methods Brent and Golden. The scipy minimizer never used the bounds but silently accepted them. In scipy v1.11.0.dev0+ an error is raised, so we now pass None as the bounds to the minimizer. Users should not be affected by this change. [#14232]

astropy.io.fits

• Tables with multidimensional variable length array can now be properly read and written. [#13417]

astropy.units

• Modified the behavior of numpy.histogram(), numpy.histogram_bin_edges(), numpy.histogram2d(), and numpy.histogramdd() so that the range argument must a compatible instance of astropy.units.Quantity if the other arguments are instances of astropy.units.Quantity. [#14213]

astropy.visualization

• Improved the performance of drawing WCSAxes grids by skipping some unnecessary computations. [#14164]

• Fixed WCSAxes sometimes triggering a NumPy RuntimeWarning when determining the coordinate range of the axes. [#14211]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fix compatibility with Numpy 1.24. [#14193]

Version 5.2 (2022-12-12)

New Features

astropy.coordinates

• Adds new topocentric ITRS frame and direct transforms to and from the observed frames AltAz and HADec with the ability to add or remove refraction corrections as required. Since these frames are all within the ITRS, there are no corrections applied other than refraction in the transforms. This makes the topocentric ITRS frame and these transforms convenient for observers of near Earth objects where stellar aberration should be omitted. [#13398]

• Allow comparing SkyCoord to frames with data. [#13477]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmology instance can be parsed from or converted to a HTML table using the new HTML methods in Cosmology’s to/from_format I/O. [#13075]

• A new comparison function has been added – cosmology_equal() – that mirrors its numpy counterpart but allows for the arguments to be converted to a Cosmology and to compare flat cosmologies with their non-flat equivalents. [#13104]

• Cosmology equivalence for flat FLRW cosmologies has been generalized to apply to all cosmologies using the FlatCosmology mixin. [#13261]

• The cosmological redshift unit now has a physical type of "redshift". [#13561]

astropy.io.ascii

• Add ability to read and write a fixed width ASCII table that includes additional header rows specifying any or all of the column dtype, unit, format, and description. This is available in the fixed_width and fixed_width_two_line formats via the new header_rows keyword argument. [#13734]

astropy.io.fits

• Added support to the io.fits API for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.fits or ~<username>/file.fits, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13131]

• Added support for opening remote and cloud-hosted FITS files using the fsspec package, which has been added as an optional dependency. [#13238]

astropy.io.votable

• Added support in io.votable for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.xml or ~<username>/file.xml, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13149]

astropy.modeling

• Add option to non-linear fitters which enables automatic exclusion of non-finite values from the fit data. [#13259]

astropy.nddata

• Modified Cutout2D to allow objects of type astropy.io.fits.Section to be passed to the data parameter. [#13238]

• Add a PSF image representation to astropy.nddata.NDData and astropy.nddata.CCDData. [#13743]

astropy.table

• An Astropy table can now be converted to a scalar NumPy object array. For NumPy >= 1.20, a list of Astropy tables can be converted to an NumPy object array of tables. [#13469]

astropy.time

• Added the astropy.time.Time.mean() method which also enables the numpy.mean() function to be used on instances of astropy.time.Time. [#13508]

• Improve the performance of getting the string representation of a large Time or TimeDelta object. This is done via a new to_string() method that does the time string format conversion only for the outputted values. Previously the entire array was formatted in advance. [#13555]

astropy.units

• It is now possible to use unit format names as string format specifiers for a Quantity, e.g. f'{1e12*u.m/u.s:latex_inline}' now produces the string '$1 \\times 10^{12} \\; \\mathrm{m\\,s^{-1}}$'. [#13050]

• Ensure that the argmin and argmax methods of Quantity support the keepdims argument when numpy does (numpy version 1.22 and later). [#13329]

• numpy.lib.recfunctions.merge_arrays() is registered with numpy overload for Quantity. [#13669]

• Added SI prefixes for quecto (“q”, \(10^{-30}\)), ronto (“r”, \(10^{-27}\)), ronna (“R”, \(10^{27}\)), and quetta (“Q”, \(10^{30}\)). [#14046]

astropy.utils

• Added the use_fsspec, fsspec_kwargs, and close_files arguments to utils.data.get_readable_fileobj. [#13238]

• Ensure that the argmin and argmax methods of Masked instances support the keepdims argument when numpy does (numpy version 1.22 and later). [#13329]

astropy.visualization

• Add helper functions for WCSAxes instances to draw the instrument beam and a physical scale. [#12102]

• Add a scatter_coord method to the wcsaxes functionality based on the existing plot_coord method but that calls matplotlib.pyplot.scatter. [#13562]

• Added a sinh stretch option to simple_norm. [#13746]

• It is now possible to define “tickable” gridlines for the purpose of placing ticks or tick labels in the interior of WCSAxes plots. [#13829]

API Changes

astropy.convolution

• Removed deprecated MexicanHat1DKernel and MexicanHat2DKernel classes. Please use RickerWavelet1DKernel and RickerWavelet2DKernel instead. [#13300]

astropy.units

• Multiplying a LogQuantity like Magnitude with dimensionless physical units by an array will no longer downcast to Quantity. [#12579]

• Quantity normally upcasts integer dtypes to floats, unless the dtype is specifically provided. Before this happened when dtype=None; now the default has been changed to dtype=numpy.inexact and dtype=None has the same meaning as in numpy. [#12941]

• In “in-place unit changes” of the form quantity <<= new_unit, the result will now share memory with the original only if the conversion could be done through a simple multiplication with a scale factor. Hence, memory will not be shared if the quantity has integer `dtype` or is structured, or when the conversion is through an equivalency. [#13638]

• When Quantity is constructed from a structured array and unit is None, the default unit is now structured like the input data. [#13676]

astropy.utils

• astropy.utils.misc.suppress has been removed, use contextlib.suppress instead. astropy.utils.namedtuple_asdict has been removed, instead use method ._asdict on a namedtuple. override__dir__ has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version, see the docstring for the better alternative. [#13636]

• astropy.utils.misc.possible_filename has been removed. [#13661]

astropy.visualization

• Rename number-of-samples keyword nsamples in ZScaleInterval to align with the n_samples keyword used in all other Interval classes in this module. [#13810]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed convolution Kernels to ensure the that returned kernels are normalized to sum to one (e.g., Gaussian1DKernel, Gaussian2DKernel). Also fixed the Kernel truncation calculation. [#13299]

• Fix import error with setuptools v65.6.0 by replacing numpy.ctypeslib.load_library with Cython to load the C convolution extension. [#14035]

astropy.coordinates

• BaseCoordinateFrame.get_frame_attr_names() had a misleading name, because it actually provided a dict of attribute names and their default values. It is now deprecated and replaced by BaseCoordinateFrame.get_frame_attr_defaults(). The fastest way to obtain the attribute names is BaseFrame.frame_attributes.keys(). [#13484]

• Fixed bug that caused earth_orientation.nutation_matrix() to error instead of returning output. [#13572]

• Ensure that angle.to_string() continues to work after pickling, and that units passed on to to_string() or the Angle initializer can be composite units (like u.hour**1), which might result from preceding calculations. [#13933]

astropy.io.fits

• report_diff_values() have now two new parameters rtol and atol to make the report consistent with numpy.allclose results. This fixes FITSDiff with multi-dimensional columns. [#13465]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed two bugs in validator.validator.make_validation_report: - ProgressBar iterator was not called correctly. - make_validation_report now handles input string urls correctly. [#14102]

astropy.timeseries

• Fixed a performance regression in timeseries.aggregate_downsample introduced in Astropy 5.0 / #11266. [#13069]

astropy.units

• Unit changes of the form quantity <<= new_unit will now work also if the quantity is integer. The result will always be float. This means that the result will not share memory with the original. [#13638]

• Ensure dimensionless quantities can be added inplace to regular ndarray. [#13913]

astropy.utils

• Fixed an incompatibility with latest Python 3.1x versions that kept astropy.utils.data.download_file from switching to TLS+FTP mode. [#14092]

• np.quantile and np.percentile can now be used on Masked

  arrays and quantities also with keepdims=True. [#14113]

astropy.visualization

• Significantly improve performance of ManualInterval when both limits are specified manually. [#13898]

Other Changes and Additions

• The deprecated private astropy._erfa module has been removed. Use pyerfa, which is a dependency of astropy and can be imported directly using import erfa. [#13317]

• The minimum version required for numpy is now 1.20 and that for scipy 1.5. [#13885]

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 4.2.0. [#14020]

Version 5.1.1 (2022-10-23)

API Changes

astropy.wcs

• The pixel argument to astropy.visualization.wcsaxes.ticklabels.TickLabels.add no longer does anything, is deprecated, and will be removed in a future astropy version. It has been replaced by a new required data argument, which should be used to specify the data coordinates of the tick label being added.

  This changes has been made because it is (in general) not possible to correctly calculate pixel coordinates before Matplotlib is drawing a figure. [#12630]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug that prevented SkyOffsetFrame instances to be pickled by adding a custom __reduce__ method to the class (see issue #9249). [#13305]

• Fixed the check for invalid Latitude values for float32 values. Latitude now accepts the float32 value of pi/2, which was rejected before because a comparison was made using the slightly smaller float64 representation. See issue #13708. [#13745]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed confusing chained exception messages of read() function when it fails. [#13170]

• When writing out a Table to HTML format, the formats keyword argument to the write() method will now be applied. [#13453]

astropy.io.fits

• heapsize is now checked for VLA tables. An error is thrown whether P format is used but the heap size is bigger than what can be indexed with a 32 bit signed int. [#13429]

• Fix parsing of ascii TFORM when precision is missing. [#13520]

• A compressed image HDU created from the header of a PRIMARY HDU, now correctly updates ‘XTENSION’ and ‘SIMPLE’ keywords. [#13557]

• Empty variable-length arrays are now properly handled when pathological combinations of heapoffset and heapsize are encountered. [#13621]

• PCOUNT and GCOUNT keywords are now removed from an uncompressed Primary header, for compliance with fitsverify behavior. [#13753]

astropy.modeling

• Bugfix for using MagUnit units on model parameters. [#13158]

• Fix bug in using non-linear fitters to fit 0-degree polynomials using weights. [#13628]

astropy.table

• Fix a problem where accessing one field of a structured column returned a Column with the same info as the original column. This resulted in unintuitive behavior in general and an exception if the format for the column was set. [#13269]

• Tables with columns with structured data can now be properly stacked and joined. [#13306]

• Update jQuery to 3.6.0, to pick up security fixes. [#13438]

• Fix a Python 3.11 compatibility issue. Ensure that when removing a table column that the pprint_include_names or pprint_exclude_names attributes get updated correctly. [#13639]

• When using add_columns with same indexes in indexes option or without specifying the option, the order of the new columns will now be kept. [#13783]

• Fix a bug when printing or getting the representation of a multidimensional table column that has a zero dimension. [#13838]

• Ensure that mixin columns and their info are not shared between tables even when their underlying data is shared with copy=False. [#13842]

astropy.time

• Fix Time.insert() on times which have their out_subfmt set. [#12732]

• Prevent Time() from being initialized with an invalid precision leading to incorrect results when representing the time as a string. [#13068]

• Fix a bug in Time where a date string like “2022-08-01.123” was being parsed as an ISO-format time “2022-08-01 00:00:00.123”. The fractional part at the end of the string was being taken as seconds. Now this raises an exception because the string is not in ISO format. [#13731]

astropy.units

• Significantly improved the performance of parsing composite units with the FITS format, by ensuring the detailed_exception argument is properly passed on and thus used. [#12699]

• Ensure that np.concatenate on quantities can take a dtype argument (added in numpy 1.20). [#13323]

• Ensure that the units of any initial argument to reductions such as np.add.reduce (which underlies np.sum) are properly taken into account. [#13340]

astropy.utils

• Ensure that np.concatenate on masked data can take a dtype argument (added in numpy 1.20). [#13323]

• Fix error when suppressing download progress bar while using non-default sys.stdout stream. [#13352]

• Ensure str and repr work properly for Masked versions of structured subarrays. [#13404]

• If an attribute is created using deprecated_attribute() with the alternative argument then getting or setting the value of the deprecated attribute now accesses its replacement. [#13824]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed calling .tight_layout() on a WCSAxes. [#12418]

astropy.wcs

• WCS.pixel_to_world now creates an EarthLocation object using MJD-AVG if present before falling back to the old behaviour of using MJD-OBS. [#12598]

• The locations of WCSAxes ticks and tick-labels are now correctly calculated when the DPI of a figure changes between a WCSAxes being created and the figure being drawn, or when a rasterized artist is added to the WCSAxes. [#12630]

• Fix a bug where SlicedLowLevelWCS.world_to_pixel_values would break when the result of the transform is dependent on the coordinate of a sliced out pixel. [#13579]

• Updated bundled WCSLIB version to 7.12. This update includes bug fixes to wcssub() in how it handles temporal axes with -TAB and fixes handling of status returns from linp2x() and linx2p() relating to distortion functions, in particular affecting TPV distortions - see #13509. For a full list of changes - see http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/CHANGES or astropy/cextern/wcslib/CHANGES. [#13635]

• Fixed WCS validation not working properly if HDUList is needed for multi-extension FITS file. [#13668]

Other Changes and Additions

• Development wheels of astropy should now be installed from https://pypi.anaconda.org/astropy/simple instead of from https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/astropy-project/astropy/_packaging/nightly/pypi/simple. [#13431]

• Compatibility with Python 3.11, 3.10.7, 3.9.14, 3.8.14 [#13614]

Version 5.1 (2022-05-24)

New Features

astropy.coordinates

• The ephemeris used in astropy.coordinates can now be set to any version of the JPL ephemeris available from https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/spk/planets/. [#12541]

• Angle.to_string() now accepts the 'latex_inline' unit format. [#13056]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmology instance can be parsed from or converted to a YAML string using the new “yaml” format in Cosmology’s to/from_format I/O. [#12279]

• Register “astropy.row” into Cosmology’s to/from format I/O, allowing a Cosmology instance to be parse from or converted to an Astropy Table Row. [#12313]

• A method clone has been added to Parameter to quickly deep copy the object and change any constructor argument. A supporting equality method is added, and repr is enhanced to be able to roundtrip – eval(repr(Parameter())) – if the Parameter’s arguments can similarly roundtrip. Parameter’s arguments are made keyword-only. [#12479]

• Add methods Otot and Otot0 to FLRW cosmologies to calculate the total energy density of the Universe. [#12590]

• Add property is_flat to cosmologies to calculate the curvature of the Universe. Cosmology is now an abstract class and subclasses must override the abstract property is_flat. [#12606]

• For converting a cosmology to a mapping, two new boolean keyword arguments are added: cosmology_as_str for turning the class reference to a string, instead of the class object itself, and move_from_meta to merge the metadata with the rest of the returned mapping instead of adding it as a nested dictionary. [#12710]

• Register format “astropy.cosmology” with Cosmology I/O. [#12736]

• Cosmological equivalency (Cosmology.is_equivalent) can now be extended to any Python object that can be converted to a Cosmology, using the new keyword argument format. This allows e.g. a properly formatted Table to be equivalent to a Cosmology. [#12740]

• The new module cosmology/tests/helper.py has been added to provide tools for testing the cosmology module and related extensions. [#12966]

• A new property nonflat has been added to flat cosmologies (FlatCosmologyMixin subclasses) to get an equivalent cosmology, but of the corresponding non-flat class. [#13076]

• clone has been enhanced to allow for flat cosmologies to clone on the equivalent non-flat cosmology. [#13099]

• cosmology file I/O uses the Unified Table I/O interface, which has added support for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.ecsv or ~<username>/file.ecsv, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13129]

astropy.io.ascii

• Simplify the way that the converters argument of io.ascii.read is provided. Previously this required wrapping each data type as the tuple returned by the io.ascii.convert_numpy() function and ensuring that the value is a list. With this update you can write converters={'col1': bool} to force conversion as a bool instead of the previous syntax converters={'col1': [io.ascii.convert_numpy(bool)]}. Note that this update is back-compatible with the old behavior. [#13073]

• Added support in io.ascii for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.csv or ~<username>/file.csv, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13130]

astropy.io.fits

• Add option unit_parse_strict to astropy.io.fits.connect.read_table_fits to enable warnings or errors about invalid FITS units when using astropy.table.Table.read. The default for this new option is "warn", which means warnings are now raised for columns with invalid units. [#11843]

• Changes default FITS behavior to use buffered I/O rather than unbuffered I/O for performance reasons. [#12081]

• astropy.io.fits.Header now has a method to calculate the size (in bytes) of the data portion (with or without padding) following that header. [#12110]

astropy.io.misc

• Allow serialization of model unit equivalencies. [#10198]

• Built-in Cosmology subclasses can now be converted to/from YAML with the functions dump and load in astropy.io.misc.yaml. [#12279]

• Add asdf support for Cosine1D, Tangent1D, ArcSine1D, ArcCosine1D, and ArcTangent1D models. [#12895]

• Add asdf support for Spline1D models. [#12897]

astropy.io.registry

• Added support to the Unified Table I/O interface for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.csv or ~<username>/file.csv, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13129]

astropy.modeling

• Add new fitters based on scipy.optimize.least_squares method of non-linear least-squares optimization: [#12051]

  • TRFLSQFitter using the Trust Region Reflective algorithm.

  • LMLSQFitter using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (implemented by scipy.optimize.least_squares).

  • DogBoxLSQFitter using the dogleg algorithm.

• Enable direct use of the ignored feature of ModelBoundingBox by users in addition to its use as part of enabling CompoundBoundingBox. [#12384]

• Switch modeling.projections to use astropy.wcs.Prjprm wrapper internally and provide access to the astropy.wcs.Prjprm structure. [#12558]

• Add error to non-finite inputs to the LevMarLSQFitter, to protect against soft scipy failure. [#12811]

• Allow the Ellipse2D and Sersic2D theta parameter to be input as an angular quantity. [#13030]

• Added Schechter1D model. [#13116]

astropy.nddata

• Add support for converting between uncertainty types. This uncertainty conversion system uses a similar flow to the coordinate subsystem, where Cartesian is used as the common system. In this case, variance is used as the common system. [#12057]

• The as_image_hdu option is now available for CCDData.to_hdu and CCDData.write. This option allows the user to get an ImageHDU as the first item of the returned HDUList, instead of the default PrimaryHDU. [#12962]

• File I/O through nddata.CCDData uses the Unified I/O interface, which has added support for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.csv or ~<username>/file.csv, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13129]

astropy.table

• A new keyword-only argument kind was added to the Table.sort method to specify the sort algorithm. [#12637]

• Columns which are numpy structured arrays are now fully supported, effectively allowing tables within tables. This applies to Column, MaskedColumn, and Quantity columns. These structured data columns can be stored in ECSV, FITS, and HDF5 formats. [#12644]

• Improve the performance of np.searchsorted by a factor of 1000 for a bytes-type Column when the search value is str or an array of str. This happens commonly for string data stored in FITS or HDF5 format files. [#12680]

• Add support for using mixin columns in group aggregation operations when the mixin supports the specified operation (e.g. np.sum works for Quantity but not Time). In cases where the operation is not supported the code now issues a warning and drops the column instead of raising an exception. [#12825]

• Added support to the Unified Table I/O interface for reading and writing file paths of the form ~/file.csv or ~<username>/file.csv, referring to the home directory of the current user or the specified user, respectively. [#13129]

astropy.time

• Add support for calling numpy.linspace() with two Time instances to generate a or multiple linearly spaced set(s) of times. [#13132]

astropy.units

• structured_to_unstructured and unstructured_to_structured in numpy.lib.recfunctions now work with Quantity. [#12486]

• Implement multiplication and division of LogQuantities and numbers [#12566]

• New doppler_redshift equivalency to convert between Doppler redshift and radial velocity. [#12709]

• Added the where keyword argument to the mean(),``var()``, std() and nansum() methods of astropy.units.Quantity. Also added the intial keyword argument to astropy.units.Quantity.nansum(). [#12891]

• Added “Maxwell” as a unit for magnetic flux to the CGS module. [#12975]

• Quantity.to_string() and FunctionUnitBase.to_string() now accept the 'latex_inline' unit format. The output of StructuredUnit.to_string() when called with format='latex_inline' is now more consistent with the output when called with format='latex'. [#13056]

astropy.utils

• Added the where keyword argument to the mean(), var(), std(), any(), and all() methods of astropy.utils.masked.MaskedNDArray. [#12891]

• Improve handling of unavailable IERS-A (predictive future Earth rotation) data in two ways. First, allow conversions with degraded accuracy if the IERS-A data are missing or do not cover the required time span. This is done with a new config item conf.iers_degraded_accuracy which specifies the behavior when times are outside the range of IERS table. The options are ‘error’ (raise an IERSRangeError, default), ‘warn’ (issue a IERSDegradedAccuracyWarning) or ‘ignore’ (ignore the problem). Second, the logic for auto-downloads was changed to guarantee that no matter what happens with the IERS download operations, only warnings will be issued. [#13052]

astropy.wcs

• astropy.wcs.Celprm and astropy.wcs.Prjprm have been added to allow access to lower level WCSLIB functionality and to allow direct access to the cel and prj members of Wcsprm. [#12514]

• Add temporal properties for convenient access of/selection of/testing for the TIME axis introduced in WCSLIB version 7.8. [#13094]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• The dms_to_degrees and hms_to_hours functions (and implicitly tuple-based initialization of Angle) is now deprecated, as it was difficult to be sure about the intent of the user for signed values of the degrees/hours, minutes, and seconds. [#13162]

astropy.cosmology

• The already deprecated Planck18_arXiv_v2 has been removed. Use Planck18 instead [#12354]

• default_cosmology.get_cosmology_from_string is deprecated and will be removed in two minor versions. Use getattr(astropy.cosmology, <str>) instead. [#12375]

• In I/O, conversions of Parameters move more relevant information from the Parameter to the Column. The default Parameter format_spec is changed from ".3g" to "". [#12612]

• Units of redshift are added to z_reion in built-in realizations’ metadata. [#12624]

• Cosmology realizations (e.g. Planck18) and parameter dictionaries are now lazily loaded from source files. [#12746]

• The Cosmology Parameter argument “fmt” for specifying a format spec has been deprecated in favor of using the built-in string representation from the Parameter’s value’s dtype. [#13072]

astropy.io.ascii

• When reading an ECSV file, changed the type checking to issue an InvalidEcsvDatatypeWarning instead of raising a ValueError exception if the datatype of a column is not recognized in the ECSV standard. This also applies to older versions of ECSV files which used to silently proceed but now warn first. [#12841]

astropy.io.fits

• Removed deprecated clobber argument from functions in astropy.io.fits. [#12258]

• Add -s/--sort argument to fitsheader to sort the fitsort-mode output. [#13106]

astropy.io.misc

• Deprecate asdf in astropy core in favor of the asdf-astropy package. [#12903, #12930]

astropy.modeling

• Made astropy.modeling.fitting._fitter_to_model_params and astropy.modeling.fitting._model_to_fit_params public methods. [#12585]

astropy.table

• Change the repr of the Table object to replace embedded newlines and tabs with r'\n' and r'\t' respectively. This improves the display of such tables. [#12631]

• A new keyword-only argument kind was added to the Table.sort method to specify the sort algorithm. The signature of Table.sort was modified so that the reverse argument is now keyword-only. Previously reverse could be specified as the second positional argument. [#12637]

• Changed behavior when a structured numpy.ndarray is added as a column to a Table. Previously this was converted to a NdarrayMixin subclass of ndarray and added as a mixin column. This was because saving as a file (e.g. HDF5, FITS, ECSV) was not supported for structured array columns. Now a structured numpy.ndarray is added to the table as a native Column and saving to file is supported. [#13236]

astropy.tests

• Backward-compatible import of astropy.tests.disable_internet has been removed; use pytest_remotedata.disable_internet from pytest-remotedata instead. [#12633]

• Backward-compatible import of astropy.tests.helper.remote_data has been removed; use pytest.mark.remote_data from pytest-remotedata instead. [#12633]

• The following are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use pytest warning and exception handling instead: [#12633]

  • astropy.io.ascii.tests.common.raises

  • astropy.tests.helper.catch_warnings

  • astropy.tests.helper.ignore_warnings

  • astropy.tests.helper.raises

  • astropy.tests.helper.enable_deprecations_as_exceptions

  • astropy.tests.helper.treat_deprecations_as_exceptions

• Backward-compatible plugin astropy.tests.plugins.display has been removed; use pytest-astropy-header instead. [#12633]

astropy.time

• Creating an TimeDelta object with numerical inputs that do not have a unit and without specifying an explicit format, for example TimeDelta(5), now results in a TimeDeltaMissingUnitWarning. This also affects statements like Time("2020-01-01") + 5 or Time("2020-01-05") - Time("2020-01-03") < 5, which implicitly transform the right-hand side into an TimeDelta instance. [#12888]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• The machinery that makes observatory locations available as EarthLocation objects is now smarter about processing observatory names from its data files. More names are available for use and the empty string is no longer considered to be a valid name. [#12721]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed io.ascii read and write functions for most formats to correctly handle data fields with embedded newlines for both the fast and pure-Python readers and writers. [#12631]

• Fix an issue when writing Time table columns to a file when the time format is one of datetime, datetime64, or ymdhms. Previously, writing a Time column with one of these formats could result in an exception or else an incorrect output file that cannot be read back in. [#12842]

astropy.io.fits

• Add a mask_invalid option to Table.read to allow deactivating the masking of NaNs in float columns and empty strings in string columns. This option is necessary to allow effective use of memory-mapped reading with memmap=True. [#12544]

• Fix CompImageHeader.clear(). [#13102]

astropy.modeling

• Bugfix for ignore functionality failing in ModelBoundingBox when using ignore option alongside passing bounding box data as tuples. [#13032]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug in Table.show_in_browser using the jsviewer=True option to display the table with sortable columns. Previously the sort direction arrows were not being shown due to missing image files for the arrows. [#12716]

• Fix an issue when writing Time table columns to a file when the time format is one of datetime, datetime64, or ymdhms. Previously, writing a Time column with one of these formats could result in an exception or else an incorrect output file that cannot be read back in. [#12842]

• Fixed a bug where it is not possible to set the .info.format property of a table structured column and get formatted output. [#13233]

• Fixed a bug when adding a masked structured array to a table. Previously this was auto-converted to a NdarrayMixin which loses the mask. With this fix the data are added to the table as a MaskedColumn and the mask is preserved. [#13236]

astropy.time

• Fix an issue when writing Time table columns to a file when the time format is one of datetime, datetime64, or ymdhms. Previously, writing a Time column with one of these formats could result in an exception or else an incorrect output file that cannot be read back in. [#12842]

astropy.utils

• Fixed a bug which caused numpy.interp to produce incorrect results when Masked arrays were passed. [#12978]

• Fixed HAS_YAML not working as intended. [#13066]

astropy.wcs

• Convert NoConvergence errors to warnings in world_to_pixel_values so that callers can work at least with the non converged solution. [#11693]

• Expose the ability to select TIME axis introduced in WCSLIB version 7.8. [#13062]

• Do not call wcstab on wcscopy and copy wtb members from the original WCS. [#13063]

• Updated bundled WCSLIB version to 7.11. This update together with 7.10 includes bug fixes to tabini() and tabcpy() as well as several print formatting enhancements. For a full list of changes - see http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/CHANGES [#13171]

• Fixed error that occurred in WCS.world_to_pixel for WCS objects with a spectral axis and observer location information when passing a SpectralCoord that had missing observer or target information. [#13228]

Version 5.0.4 (2022-03-31)

Bug Fixes

astropy.modeling

• Fixed the Gaussian2D bounding_box when theta is an angular Quantity. [#13021]

astropy.utils

• Reverted astropy.utils.iers.iers.IERS_A_URL to maia.usno.navy.mil domain instead of NASA FTP to work around server issues. [#13004]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled WCSLIB to version 7.9 with several bugfixes and added support for time coordinate axes in wcsset() and wcssub(). The four-digit type code for the time axis will have the first digit set to 4, i.e., four digit code will be 4xxx where x is a digit 0-9. For a full list of bug fixes see https://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/CHANGES [#12994]

Version 5.0.3 (2022-03-25)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Bugfix in astropy.convolution.utils.discretize_model which allows the function to handle a CompoundModel. Before this fix, discretize_model was confusing CompoundModel with a callable function. [#12959]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix write and read FITS tables with multidimensional items, using from_columns without previousely defined ColDefs structure. [#12863]

astropy.io.votable

• Fix VOTable linting to avoid use of shell option. [#12985]

astropy.utils

• Fix XML linting to avoid use of shell option. [#12985]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 4.1.0. [#12967]

Version 5.0.2 (2022-03-10)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Bugfix to add backwards compatibility for reading ECSV version 0.9 files with non-standard column datatypes (such as object, str, datetime64, etc.), which would raise a ValueError in ECSV version 1.0. [#12880]

astropy.io.misc

• Bugfix for units_mapping schema’s property name conflicts. Changes:

  • inputs to unit_inputs

  • outputs to unit_outputs [#12800]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed a bug where astropy.io.votable.validate was printing output to sys.stdout when the output parameter was set to None. validate now returns a string when output is set to None, as documented. [#12604]

astropy.modeling

• Fix handling of units on scale parameter in BlackBody model. [#12318]

• Indexing on models can now be used with all types of integers (like numpy.int64) instead of just int. [#12561]

• Fix computation of the separability of a CompoundModel where another CompoundModel is on the right hand side of the & operator. [#12907]

• Provide a hook (Model._calculate_separability_matrix) to allow subclasses of Model to define how to compute their separability matrix. [#12900]

astropy.stats

• Fixed a bug in which running kuiper_false_positive_probability(D,N) on distributions with many data points could produce NaN values for the false positive probability of the Kuiper statistic. [#12896]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed a bug due to which naxis, pixel_shape, and pixel_bounds attributes of astropy.wcs.WCS were not restored when an astropy.wcs.WCS object was unpickled. This fix also eliminates FITSFixedWarning warning issued during unpiclikng of the WCS objects related to the number of axes. This fix also eliminates errors when unpickling WCS objects originally created using non-default values for key, colsel, and keysel parameters. [#12844]

Version 5.0.1 (2022-01-26)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Trying to create an instance of astropy.coordinates.Distance by providing both z and parallax now raises the expected ValueError. [#12531]

• Fixed a bug where changing the wrap angle of the longitude component of a representation could raise a warning or error in certain situations. [#12556]

• astropy.coordinates.Distance constructor no longer ignores the unit keyword when parallax is provided. [#12569]

astropy.cosmology

• astropy.cosmology.utils.aszarr can now convert Column objects. [#12525]

• Reading a cosmology from an ECSV will load redshift and Hubble parameter units from the cosmology units module. [#12636]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix formatting issue in _dump_coldefs and add tests for tabledump and tableload convenience functions. [#12526]

astropy.io.misc

• YAML can now also represent quantities and arrays with structured dtype, as well as structured scalars based on np.void. [#12509]

astropy.modeling

• Fixes error when fitting multiplication or division based compound models where the sub-models have different output units. [#12475]

• Bugfix for incorrectly initialized and filled parameters data for Spline1D model. [#12523]

• Bugfix for keyerror thrown by Model.input_units_equivalencies when used on fix_inputs models which have no set unit equivalencies. [#12597]

astropy.table

• astropy.table.Table.keep_columns() and astropy.table.Table.remove_columns() now work with generators of column names. [#12529]

• Avoid duplicate storage of info in serialized columns if the column used to serialize already can hold that information. [#12607]

astropy.timeseries

• Fixed edge case bugs which emerged when using aggregate_downsample with custom bins. [#12527]

astropy.units

• Structured units can be serialized to/from yaml. [#12492]

• Fix bad typing problems by removing interaction with NDArray.__class_getitem__. [#12511]

• Ensure that Quantity.to_string(format='latex') properly typesets exponents also when u.quantity.conf.latex_array_threshold = -1 (i.e., when the threshold is taken from numpy). [#12573]

• Structured units can now be copied with copy.copy and copy.deepcopy and also pickled and unpicked also for protocol >= 2. This does not work for big-endian architecture with older numpy<1.21.1. [#12583]

astropy.utils

• Ensure that a Masked instance can be used to initialize (or viewed as) a numpy.ma.Maskedarray. [#12482]

• Ensure Masked also works with numpy >=1.22, which has a keyword argument name change for np.quantile. [#12511]

• astropy.utils.iers.LeapSeconds.auto_open() no longer emits unnecessary warnings when astropy.utils.iers.conf.auto_max_age is set to None. [#12713]

Version 5.0 (2021-11-15)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• Added dealiasing support to convolve_fft. [#11495]

astropy.coordinates

• Added missing coordinate transformations where the starting and ending frames are the same (i.e., loopback transformations). [#10909]

• Allow negation, multiplication and division also of representations that include a differential (e.g., SphericalRepresentation with a SphericalCosLatDifferential). For all operations, the outcome is equivalent to transforming the representation and differential to cartesian, then operating on those, and transforming back to the original representation (except for UnitSphericalRepresentation, which will return a SphericalRepresentation if there is a scale change). [#11470]

• RadialRepresentation.transform can work with a multiplication matrix only. All other matrices still raise an exception. [#11576]

• transform methods are added to BaseDifferential and CartesianDifferential. All transform methods on Representations now delegate transforming differentials to the differential objects. [#11654]

• Adds new HADec built-in frame with transformations to/from ICRS and CIRS. This frame complements AltAz to give observed coordinates (hour angle and declination) in the ITRS for an equatorially mounted telescope. [#11676]

• SkyCoord objects now have a to_table() method, which allows them to be converted to a QTable. [#11743]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmologies now store metadata in a mutable parameter meta. The initialization arguments name and meta are keyword-only. [#11542]

• A new unit, redshift, is defined. It is a dimensionless unit to distinguish redshift quantities from other non-redshift values. For compatibility with dimensionless quantities the equivalency dimensionless_redshift is added. This equivalency is enabled by default. [#11786]

• Add equality operator for comparing Cosmology instances. Comparison is done on all immutable fields (this excludes ‘meta’).

  Now the following will work:

  >>> from astropy.cosmology import Planck13, Planck18
  >>> Planck13 == Planck18
  False
  
  >>> Planck18 == Planck18
  True [#11813]
  

• Added read/write methods to Cosmology using the Unified I/O registry. Now custom file format readers, writers, and format-identifier functions can be registered to read, write, and identify, respectively, Cosmology objects. Details are discussed in an addition to the docs. [#11948]

• Added to_format/from_format methods to Cosmology using the Unified I/O registry. Now custom format converters and format-identifier functions can be registered to transform Cosmology objects. The transformation between Cosmology and dictionaries is pre-registered. Details are discussed in an addition to the docs. [#11998]

• Added units module for defining and collecting cosmological units and equivalencies. [#12092]

• Flat cosmologies are now set by a mixin class, FlatCosmologyMixin and its FLRW-specific subclass FlatFLRWMixin. All FlatCosmologyMixin are flat, but not all flat cosmologies are instances of FlatCosmologyMixin. As example, LambdaCDM may be flat (for the a specific set of parameter values), but FlatLambdaCDM will be flat.

  Cosmology parameters are now descriptors. When accessed from a class they transparently stores information, like the units and accepted equivalencies. On a cosmology instance, the descriptor will return the parameter value. Parameters can have custom getter methods.

  Cosmological equality is refactored to check Parameters (and the name) A new method, is_equivalent, is added to check Cosmology equivalence, so a FlatLambdaCDM and flat LambdaCDM are equivalent. [#12136]

• Replaced z = np.asarray(z) with z = u.Quantity(z, u.dimensionless_unscaled).value in Cosmology methods. Input of values with incorrect units raises a UnitConversionError or TypeError. [#12145]

• Cosmology Parameters allow for custom value setters. Values can be set once, but will error if set a second time. If not specified, the default setter is used, which will assign units using the Parameters units and equivalencies (if present). Alternate setters may be registered with Parameter to be specified by a str, not a decorator on the Cosmology. [#12190]

• Cosmology instance conversion to dict now accepts keyword argument cls to determine dict type, e.g. OrderedDict. [#12209]

• A new equivalency is added between redshift and the Hubble parameter and values with units of little-h. This equivalency is also available in the catch-all equivalency with_redshift. [#12211]

• A new equivalency is added between redshift and distance – comoving, lookback, and luminosity. This equivalency is also available in the catch-all equivalency with_redshift. [#12212]

• Register Astropy Table into Cosmology’s to/from_format I/O, allowing a Cosmology instance to be parsed from or converted to a Table instance. Also adds the __astropy_table__ method allowing Table(cosmology). [#12213]

• The WMAP1 and WMAP3 are accessible as builtin cosmologies. [#12248]

• Register Astropy Model into Cosmology’s to/from_format I/O, allowing a Cosmology instance to be parsed from or converted to a Model instance. [#12269]

• Register an ECSV reader and writer into Cosmology’s I/O, allowing a Cosmology instance to be read from from or written to an ECSV file. [#12321]

astropy.io.ascii

• Added new way to specify the dtype for tables that are read: converters can specify column names with wildcards. [#11892]

• Added a new astropy.io.ascii.Mrt class to write tables in the American Astronomical Society Machine-Readable Table format, including documentation and tests for the same. [#11897, #12301, #12302]

• When writing, the input data are no longer copied, improving performance. Metadata that might be changed, such as format and serialization information, is copied, hence users can continue to count on no changes being made to the input data. [#11919]

astropy.io.misc

• Add Parquet serialization of Tables with pyarrow, including metadata support and columnar access. [#12215]

astropy.modeling

• Added fittable spline models to modeling. [#11634]

• Extensive refactor of BoundingBox for better usability and maintainability. [#11930]

• Added CompoundBoundingBox feature to ~astropy.modeling, which allows more flexibility in defining bounding boxes for models that are applied to images with many slices. [#11942]

• Improved parameter support for astropy.modeling.core.custom_model created models. [#11984]

• Added the following trigonometric models and linked them to their appropriate inverse models:

  • Cosine1D [#12158]

  • Tangent1D

  • ArcSine1D

  • ArcCosine1D

  • ArcTangent1D [#12185]

astropy.table

• Added a new method Table.update() which does a dictionary-style update of a Table by adding or replacing columns. [#11904]

• Masked quantities are now fully supported in tables. This includes QTable automatically converting MaskedColumn instances to MaskedQuantity, and Table doing the reverse. [#11914]

• Added new keyword arguments keys_left and keys_right to the table join function to support joining tables on key columns with different names. In addition the new keywords can accept a list of column-like objects which are used as the match keys. This allows joining on arbitrary data which are not part of the tables being joined. [#11954]

• Formatting of any numerical values in the output of Table.info() and Column.info() has been improved. [#12022]

• It is now possible to add dask arrays as columns in tables and have them remain as dask arrays rather than be converted to Numpy arrays. [#12219]

• Added a new registry for mixin handlers, which can be used to automatically convert array-like Python objects into mixin columns when assigned to a table column. [#12219]

astropy.time

• Adds a new method earth_rotation_angle to calculate the Local Earth Rotation Angle. Also adjusts Local Sidereal Time for the Terrestrial Intermediate Origin (TIO) and adds a rigorous correction for polar motion. The TIO adjustment is approximately 3 microseconds per century from J2000 and the polar motion correction is at most about +/-50 nanoseconds. For models IAU1982 and IAU1994, no such adjustments are made as they pre-date the TIO concept. [#11680]

astropy.timeseries

• A custom binning scheme is now available in aggregate_downsample. It allows time_bin_start and time_bin_size to be arrays, and adds an optional time_bin_end. This scheme mirrors the API for BinnedTimeSeries. [#11266]

astropy.units

• Quantity gains a __class_getitem__ to create unit-aware annotations

  with the syntax Quantity[unit or physical_type, shape, numpy.dtype]. If the python version is 3.9+ or typing_extensions is installed, these are valid static type annotations. [#10662]

• Each physical type is added to astropy.units.physical (e.g., physical.length or physical.electrical_charge_ESU). The attribute-accessible names (underscored, without parenthesis) also work with astropy.units.physical.get_physical_type. [#11691]

• It is now possible to have quantities based on structured arrays in which the unit has matching structure, giving each field its own unit, using units constructed like Unit('AU,AU/day'). [#11775]

• The milli- prefix has been added to astropy.units.Angstrom. [#11788]

• Added attributes base, coords, and index and method copy() to QuantityIterator to match numpy.ndarray.flatiter. [#11796]

• Added “angular frequency” and “angular velocity” as aliases for the “angular speed” physical type. [#11865]

• Add light-second to units of length [#12128]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.deprecated_renamed_argument() decorator now supports custom warning messages. [#12305]

• The NaN-aware numpy functions such as np.nansum now work on Masked arrays, with masked values being treated as NaN, but without raising warnings or exceptions. [#12454]

astropy.visualization

• Added a feature so that SphericalCircle will accept center parameter as a SkyCoord object. [#11790]

astropy.wcs

• astropy.wcs.utils.obsgeo_to_frame has been added to convert the obsgeo coordinate array on astropy.wcs.WCS objects to an ITRS coordinate frame instance. [#11716]

• Updated bundled WCSLIB to version 7.7 with several bugfixes. [#12034]

API Changes

astropy.config

• update_default_config and ConfigurationMissingWarning are deprecated. [#11502]

astropy.constants

• Removed deprecated astropy.constants.set_enabled_constants context manager. [#12105]

astropy.coordinates

• Positions for the Moon using the ‘builtin’ ephemeris now use the new erfa.moon98 function instead of our own implementation of the Meeus algorithm. As this also corrects a misunderstanding of the frame returned by the Meeus, this improves the agreement with the JPL ephemeris from about 30 to about 6 km rms. [#11753]

• Removed deprecated representation attribute from astropy.coordinates.BaseCoordinateFrame class. [#12257]

• SpectralQuantity and SpectralCoord .to_value method can now be called without unit argument in order to maintain a consistent interface with Quantity.to_value [#12440]

astropy.cosmology

• z_at_value now works with arrays for all arguments (except func, verbose, and method). Consequently, coordinates.Distance.z can be used when Distance is an array. [#11778]

• Remove deprecation warning and error remapping in Cosmology.clone. Now unknown arguments will raise a TypeError, not an AttributeError. [#11785]

• The read/write and to/from_format Unified I/O registries are separated and apply only to Cosmology. [#12015]

• Cosmology parameters in cosmology.parameters.py now have units, where applicable. [#12116]

• The function astropy.cosmology.utils.inf_like() is deprecated. [#12175]

• The function astropy.cosmology.utils.vectorize_if_needed() is deprecated. A new function astropy.cosmology.utils.vectorize_redshift_method() is added as replacement. [#12176]

• Cosmology base class constructor now only accepts arguments name and meta. Subclasses should add relevant arguments and not pass them to the base class. [#12191]

astropy.io

• When astropy raises an OSError because a file it was told to write already exists, the error message now always suggests the use of the overwrite=True argument. The wording is now consistent for all I/O formats. [#12179]

astropy.io.ascii

• Removed deprecated overwrite=None option for astropy.io.ascii.ui.write(). Overwriting existing files now only happens if overwrite=True. [#12171]

astropy.io.fits

• The internal class _CardAccessor is no longer registered as a subclass of the Sequence or Mapping ABCs. [#11923]

• The deprecated clobber argument will be removed from the astropy.io.fits functions in version 5.1, and the deprecation warnings now announce that too. [#12311]

astropy.io.registry

• The write function now is allowed to return possible content results, which means that custom writers could, for example, create and return an instance of some container class rather than a file on disk. [#11916]

• The registry functions are refactored into a class-based system. New Read-only, write-only, and read/write registries can be created. All functions accept a new argument registry, which if not specified, defaults to the global default registry. [#12015]

astropy.io.votable

• Deprecated the pedantic keyword argument in the astropy.io.votable.table.parse function and the corresponding configuration setting. It has been replaced by the verify option. [#12129]

astropy.modeling

• Refactored how astropy.modeling.Model handles model evaluation in order to better organize the code. [#11931]

• Removed the following deprecated modeling features:

  astropy.modeling.utils.ExpressionTree class, astropy.modeling.functional_models.MexicanHat1D model, astropy.modeling.functional_models.MexicanHat2D model, astropy.modeling.core.Model.inputs setting in model initialize, astropy.modeling.core.CompoundModel.inverse setting in model initialize, and astropy.modeling.core.CompoundModel.both_inverses_exist() method. [#11978]

• Deprecated the AliasDict class in modeling.utils. [#12411]

astropy.nddata

• Removed block_reduce and block_replicate functions from nddata.utils. These deprecated functions in nddata.utils were moved to nddata.blocks. [#12288]

astropy.stats

• Removed the following deprecated features from astropy.stats:

  • conf argument for funcs.binom_conf_interval() and funcs.binned_binom_proportion(),

  • conflevel argument for funcs.poisson_conf_interval(), and

  • conf_lvl argument for jackknife.jackknife_stats(). [#12200]

astropy.table

• Printing a Table now shows the qualified class name of mixin columns in the dtype header row instead of “object”. This applies to all the Table formatted output methods whenever show_dtype=True is selected. [#11660]

• The ‘overwrite’ argument has been added to the jsviewer table writer. Overwriting an existing file requires ‘overwrite’ to be True. [#11853]

• The ‘overwrite’ argument has been added to the pandas table writers. Overwriting an existing file requires ‘overwrite’ to be True. [#11854]

• The table join function now accepts only the first four arguments left, right, keys, and join_type as positional arguments. All other arguments must be supplied as keyword arguments. [#11954]

• Adding a dask array to a Table will no longer convert that dask to a Numpy array, so accessing t[‘dask_column’] will now return a dask array instead of a Numpy array. [#12219]

astropy.time

• Along with the new method earth_rotation_angle, sidereal_time now accepts an EarthLocation as the longitude argument. [#11680]

astropy.units

• Unit littleh and equivalency with_H0 have been moved to the cosmology module and are deprecated from astropy.units. [#12092]

astropy.utils

• astropy.utils.introspection.minversion() now uses importlib.metadata.version(). Therefore, its version_path keyword is no longer used and deprecated. This keyword will be removed in a future release. [#11714]

• Updated utils.console.Spinner to better resemble the API of utils.console.ProgressBar, including an update() method and iterator support. [#11772]

• Removed deprecated check_hashes in check_download_cache(). The function also no longer returns anything. [#12293]

• Removed unused download_cache_lock_attempts configuration item in astropy.utils.data. Deprecation was not possible. [#12293]

• Removed deprecated hexdigest keyword from import_file_to_cache(). [#12293]

• Setting remote_timeout configuration item in astropy.utils.data to 0 will no longer disable download from the Internet; Set allow_internet configuration item to False instead. [#12293]

astropy.visualization

• Removed deprecated imshow_only_kwargs keyword from imshow_norm. [#12290]

astropy.wcs

• Move complex logic from HighLevelWCSMixin.pixel_to_world and HighLevelWCSMixin.world_to_pixel into the helper functions astropy.wcs.wcsapi.high_level_api.high_level_objects_to_values and astropy.wcs.wcsapi.high_level_api.values_to_high_level_objects to allow reuse in other places. [#11950]

Bug Fixes

astropy.config

• generate_config no longer outputs wrong syntax for list type. [#12037]

astropy.constants

• Fixed a bug where an older constants version cannot be set directly after astropy import. [#12084]

astropy.convolution

• Passing an array argument for any Kernel1D or Kernel2D subclasses (with the exception of CustomKernel) will now raise a TypeError. [#11969]

astropy.coordinates

• If a Table containing a SkyCoord object as a column is written to a FITS, ECSV or HDF5 file then any velocity information that might be present will be retained. [#11750]

• The output of SkyCoord.apply_space_motion() now always has the same differential type as the SkyCoord itself. [#11932]

• Fixed bug where Angle, Latitude and Longitude with NaN values could not be printed. [#11943]

• Fixed a bug with the transformation from PrecessedGeocentric to GCRS where changes in obstime, obsgeoloc, or obsgeovel were ignored. This bug would also affect loopback transformations from one PrecessedGeocentric frame to another PrecessedGeocentric frame. [#12152]

• Fixed a bug with the transformations between TEME and ITRS or between TEME and itself where a change in obstime was ignored. [#12152]

• Avoid unnecessary transforms through CIRS for AltAz and HADec and use ICRS as intermediate frame for these transformations instead. [#12203]

• Fixed a bug where instantiating a representation with a longitude component could mutate input provided for that component even when copying is specified. [#12307]

• Wrapping an Angle array will now ignore NaN values instead of attempting to wrap them, which would produce unexpected warnings/errors when working with coordinates and representations due to internal broadcasting. [#12317]

astropy.cosmology

• Dictionaries for in-built cosmology realizations are not altered by creating the realization and are also made immutable. [#12278]

astropy.io.fits

• Prevent zero-byte writes for FITS binary tables to speed up writes on the Lustre filesystem. [#11955]

• Enable json.dump for FITS_rec with variable length (VLF) arrays. [#11957]

• Add support for reading and writing int8 images [#11996]

• Ensure header passed to astropy.io.fits.CompImageHDU does not need to contain standard cards that can be automatically generated, such as BITPIX and NAXIS. [#12061]

• Fixed a bug where astropy.io.fits.HDUDiff would ignore the ignore_blank_cards keyword argument. [#12122]

• Open uncompressed file even if extension says it’s compressed [#12135]

• Fix the computation of the DATASUM in a CompImageHDU when the data is >1D. [#12138]

• Reading files where the SIMPLE card is present but with an invalid format now issues a warning instead of raising an exception [#12234]

• Convert UNDEFINED to None when iterating over card values. [#12310]

astropy.io.misc

• Update ASDF tag versions in ExtensionType subclasses to match ASDF Standard 1.5.0. [#11986]

• Fix ASDF serialization of model inputs and outputs and add relevant assertion to test helper. [#12381]

• Fix bug preventing ASDF serialization of bounding box for models with only one input. [#12385]

astropy.io.votable

• Now accepting UCDs containing phot.color. [#11982]

astropy.modeling

• Added Parameter descriptions to the implemented models which were missing. [#11232]

• The separable property is now correctly set on models constructed with astropy.modeling.custom_model. [#11744]

• Minor bugfixes and improvements to modeling including the following:

  • Fixed typos and clarified several errors and their messages throughout modeling.

  • Removed incorrect try/except blocks around scipy code in convolution.py and functional_models.py.

  • Fixed Ring2D model’s init to properly accept all combinations of r_in, r_out, and width.

  • Fixed bug in tau validator for the Logarithmic1D and Exponential1D models when using them as model sets.

  • Fixed copy method for Parameter in order to prevent an automatic KeyError, and fixed bool for Parameter so that it functions with vector values.

  • Removed unreachable code from Parameter, the _Tabular model, and the Drude1D model.

  • Fixed validators in Drude1D model so that it functions in a model set.

  • Removed duplicated code from polynomial.py for handing of domain and window.

  • Fixed the Pix2Sky_HEALPixPolar and Sky2Pix_HEALPixPolar modes so that their evaluate and inverse methods actually work without raising an error. [#12232]

astropy.nddata

• Ensure that the wcs= argument to NDData is always parsed into a high level WCS object. [#11985]

astropy.stats

• Fixed a bug in sigma clipping where the bounds would not be returned for completely empty or masked data. [#11994]

• Fixed a bug in biweight_midvariance and biweight_scale where output data units would be dropped for constant data and where the result was a scalar NaN. [#12146]

astropy.table

• Ensured that MaskedColumn.info is propagated in all cases, so that when tables are sliced, writing will still be as requested on info.serialize_method. [#11917]

• table.conf.replace_warnings and table.jsviewer.conf.css_urls configuration items now have correct 'string_list' type. [#12037]

• Fixed an issue where initializing from a list of dict-like rows (Mappings) did not work unless the row values were instances of dict. Now any object that is an instance of the more general collections.abc.Mapping will work. [#12417]

astropy.uncertainty

• Ensure that scalar QuantityDistribution unit conversion in ufuncs works properly again. [#12471]

astropy.units

• Add quantity support for scipy.special dimensionless functions erfinv, erfcinv, gammaln and loggamma. [#10934]

• VOUnit.to_string output is now compliant with IVOA VOUnits 1.0 standards. [#11565]

• Units initialization with unicode has been expanded to include strings such as ‘M☉’ and ‘e⁻’. [#11827]

• Give a more informative NotImplementedError when trying to parse a unit using an output-only format such as ‘unicode’ or ‘latex’. [#11829]

astropy.utils

• Fixed a bug in get_readable_fileobj that prevented the unified file read interface from closing ASCII files. [#11809]

• The function astropy.utils.decorators.deprecated_attribute() no longer ignores its message, alternative, and pending arguments. [#12184]

• Ensure that when taking the minimum or maximum of a Masked array, any masked NaN values are ignored. [#12454]

astropy.visualization

• The tick labelling for radians has been fixed to remove a redundant .0 in the label for integer multiples of pi at 2pi and above. [#12221]

• Fix a bug where non-astropy.wcs.WCS WCS instances were not accepted in WCSAxes.get_transform. [#12286]

• Fix compatibility with Matplotlib 3.5 when using the grid_type='contours' mode for drawing grid lines. [#12447]

astropy.wcs

• Enabled SlicedLowLevelWCS.pixel_to_world_values to handle slices including non-int integers, e.g. numpy.int64. [#11980]

Other Changes and Additions

• In docstrings, Sphinx cross-reference targets now use intersphinx, even if the target is an internal link (link is now 'astropy:link). When built in Astropy these links are interpreted as internal links. When built in affiliate packages, the link target is set by the key ‘astropy’ in the intersphinx mapping. [#11690]

• Made PyYaml >= 3.13 a strict runtime dependency. [#11903]

• Minimum version of required Python is now 3.8. [#11934]

• Minimum version of required Scipy is now 1.3. [#11934]

• Minimum version of required Matplotlib is now 3.1. [#11934]

• Minimum version of required Numpy is now 1.18. [#11935]

• Fix deprecation warnings with Python 3.10 [#11962]

• Speed up minversion() in cases where a module with a __version__ attribute is passed. [#12174]

• astropy now requires packaging. [#12199]

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 4.0.0. When compiling with an external library, version 3.35 or later is required. [#12272]

Version 4.3.1 (2021-08-11)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• In fits.io.getdata do not fall back to first non-primary extension when user explicitly specifies an extension. [#11860]

• Ensure multidimensional masked columns round-trip properly to FITS. [#11911]

• Ensure masked times round-trip to FITS, even if multi-dimensional. [#11913]

• Raise ValueError if an np.float32 NaN/Inf value is assigned to a header keyword. [#11922]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed bug in fix_inputs handling of bounding boxes. [#11908]

astropy.table

• Fix an error when converting to pandas any Table subclass that automatically adds a table index when the table is created. An example is a binned TimeSeries table. [#12018]

astropy.units

• Ensure that unpickling quantities and units in new sessions does not change hashes and thus cause problems with (de)composition such as getting different answers from the .si attribute. [#11879]

• Fixed cannot import name imperial from astropy.units namespace. [#11977]

astropy.utils

• Ensure any .info on Masked instances is propagated correctly when viewing or slicing. As a consequence, MaskedQuantity can now be correctly written to, e.g., ECSV format with serialize_method='data_mask'. [#11910]

Version 4.3 (2021-07-26)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• Change padding sizes for fft_pad in convolve_fft from powers of 2 only to scipy-optimized numbers, applied separately to each dimension; yielding some performance gains and avoiding potential large memory impact for certain multi-dimensional inputs. [#11533]

astropy.coordinates

• Adds the ability to create topocentric CIRS frames. Using these, AltAz calculations are now accurate down to the milli-arcsecond level. [#10994]

• Adds a direct transformation from ICRS to AltAz frames. This provides a modest speedup of approximately 10 percent. [#11079]

• Adds new WGS84GeodeticRepresentation, WGS72GeodeticRepresentation, and GRS80GeodeticRepresentation. These are mostly for use inside EarthLocation but can also be used to convert between geocentric (cartesian) and different geodetic representations directly. [#11086]

• SkyCoord.guess_from_table now also searches for differentials in the table. In addition, multiple regex matches can be resolved when they are exact component names, e.g. having both columns “dec” and “pm_dec” no longer errors and will be included in the SkyCoord. [#11417]

• All representations now have a transform method, which allows them to be transformed by a 3x3 matrix in a Cartesian basis. By default, transformations are routed through CartesianRepresentation. SphericalRepresentation and PhysicssphericalRepresentation override this for speed and to prevent NaN leakage from the distance to the angular components. Also, the functions is_O3 and is_rotation have been added to matrix_utities for checking whether a matrix is in the O(3) group or is a rotation (proper or improper), respectively. [#11444]

• Moved angle formatting and parsing utilities to astropy.coordinates.angle_formats. Added new functionality to astropy.coordinates.angle_utilities for generating points on or in spherical surfaces, either randomly or on a grid. [#11628]

• Added a new method to SkyCoord, spherical_offsets_by(), which is the conceptual inverse of spherical_offsets_to(): Given angular offsets in longitude and latitude, this method returns a new coordinate with the offsets applied. [#11635]

• Refactor conversions between GCRS and CIRS,TETE for better accuracy and substantially improved speed. [#11069]

• Also refactor EarthLocation.get_gcrs for an increase in performance of an order of magnitude, which enters as well in getting observed positions of planets using get_body. [#11073]

• Refactored the usage of metaclasses in astropy.coordinates to instead use __init_subclass__ where possible. [#11090]

• Removed duplicate calls to `transform_to` from `match_to_catalog_sky` and `match_to_catalog_3d`, improving their performance. [#11449]

• The new DE440 and DE440s ephemerides are now available via shortcuts ‘de440’ and ‘de440s’. The DE 440s ephemeris will probably become the default ephemeris when choosing ‘jpl’ in 5.0. [#11601]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmology parameter dictionaries now also specify the Cosmology class to which the parameters correspond. For example, the dictionary for astropy.cosmology.parameters.Planck18 has the added key-value pair (“cosmology”, “FlatLambdaCDM”). [#11530]

astropy.io.ascii

• Added support for reading and writing ASCII tables in QDP (Quick and Dandy Plotter) format. [#11256]

• Added support for reading and writing multidimensional column data (masked and unmasked) to ECSV. Also added formal support for reading and writing object-type column data which can contain items consisting of lists, dicts, and basic scalar types. This can be used to store columns of variable-length arrays. Both of these features use JSON to convert the object to a string that is stored in the ECSV output. [#11569, #11662, #11720]

astropy.io.fits

• Added append keyword to append table objects to an existing FITS file [#2632, #11149]

• Check that the SIMPLE card is present when opening a file, to ensure that the file is a valid FITS file and raise a better error when opening a non FITS one. ignore_missing_simple can be used to skip this verification. [#10895]

• Expose Header.strip as a public method, to remove the most common structural keywords. [#11174]

• Enable the use of os.PathLike objects when dealing with (mainly FITS) files. [#11580]

astropy.io.registry

• Readers and writers can now set a priority, to assist with resolving which format to use. [#11214]

astropy.io.votable

• Version 1.4 VOTables now use the VOUnit format specification. [#11032]

• When reading VOTables using the Unified File Read/Write Interface (i.e. using the Table.read() or QTable.read() functions) it is now possible to specify all keyword arguments that are valid for astropy.io.votable.table.parse(). [#11643]

astropy.modeling

• Added a state attribute to models to allow preventing the syncing of constraint values from the constituent models. This syncing can greatly slow down fitting if there are large numbers of fit parameters. model.sync_constraints = True means check constituent model constraints for compound models every time the constraint is accessed, False, do not. Fitters that support constraints will set this to False on the model copy and then set back to True when the fit is complete before returning. [#11365]

• The convolve_models_fft function implements model convolution so that one insures that the convolution remains consistent across multiple different inputs. [#11456]

astropy.nddata

• Prevent unnecessary copies of the data during NDData arithmetic when units need to be added. [#11107]

• NDData str representations now show units, if present. [#11553]

astropy.stats

• Added the ability to specify stdfunc=’mad_std’ when doing sigma clipping, which will use a built-in function and lead to significant performance improvements if cenfunc is ‘mean’ or ‘median’. [#11664]

• Significantly improved the performance of sigma clipping when cenfunc and stdfunc are passed as strings and the grow option is not used. [#11219]

• Improved performance of bayesian_blocks() by removing one np.log() call [#11356]

astropy.table

• Add table attributes to include or exclude columns from the output when printing a table. This functionality includes a context manager to include/exclude columns temporarily. [#11190]

• Improved the string representation of objects related to Table.indices so they now indicate the object type and relevant attributes. [#11333]

astropy.timeseries

• An exception is raised when n_bins is passed as an argument while any of the parameters time_bin_start or time_bin_size is not scalar. [#11463]

astropy.units

• The physical_type attributes of each unit are now objects of the (new) astropy.units.physical.PhysicalType class instead of strings and the function astropy.units.physical.get_physical_type can now translate strings to these objects. [#11204]

• The function astropy.units.physical.def_physical_type was created to either define entirely new physical types, or to add more physical type names to an existing physical types. [#11204]

• PhysicalType’s can be operated on using operations multiplication, division, and exponentiation are to facilitate dimensional analysis. [#11204]

• It is now possible to define aliases for units using astropy.units.set_enabled_aliases. This can be used when reading files that have misspelled units. [#11258]

• Add a new “DN” unit, units.dn or units.DN, representing data number for a detector. [#11591]

astropy.utils

• Added ssl_context and allow_insecure options to download_file, as well as the ability to optionally use the certifi package to provide root CA certificates when downloading from sites secured with TLS/SSL. [#10434]

• astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_path is publicly scoped (previously the private function _find_pkg_data_path) for obtaining file paths without checking if the file/directory exists, as long as the package and module do. [#11006]

• Deprecated astropy.utils.OrderedDescriptor and astropy.utils.OrderedDescriptorContainer, as new features in Python 3 make their use less compelling. [#11094, #11099]

• astropy.utils.masked provides a new Masked class/factory that can be used to represent masked ndarray and all its subclasses, including Quantity and its subclasses. These classes can be used inside coordinates, but the mask is not yet exposed. Generally, the interface should be considered experimental. [#11127, #11792]

• Add new utils.parsing module to with helper wrappers around ply. [#11227]

• Change the Time and IERS leap second handling so that the leap second table is updated only when a Time transform involving UTC is performed. Previously this update check was done the first time a Time object was created, which in practice occurred when importing common astropy subpackages like astropy.coordinates. Now you can prevent querying internet resources (for instance on a cluster) by setting iers.conf.auto_download = False. This can be done after importing astropy but prior to performing any Time scale transformations related to UTC. [#11638]

• Added a new module at astropy.utils.compat.optional_deps to consolidate the definition of HAS_x optional dependency flag variables, like HAS_SCIPY. [#11490]

astropy.wcs

• Add IVOA UCD mappings for some FITS WCS keywords commonly used in solar physics. [#10965]

• Add STOKES FITS WCS keyword to the IVOA UCD mapping. [#11236]

• Updated bundled version of WCSLIB to version 7.6. See https://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/CHANGES for a list of included changes. [#11549]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• For input to representations, subclasses of the class required for a given attribute will now be allowed in. [#11113]

• Except for UnitSphericalRepresentation, shortcuts in representations now allow for attached differentials. [#11467]

• Allow coordinate name strings as input to SkyCoord.is_transformable_to. [#11552]

astropy.cosmology

• Change z_at_value to use scipy.optimize.minimize_scalar with default method Brent (other options Bounded and Golden) and accept bracket option to set initial search region. [#11080]

• Clarified definition of inputs to angular_diameter_distance_z1z2. The function now emits AstropyUserWarning when z2 is less than z1. [#11197]

• Split cosmology realizations from core classes, moving the former to new file realizations. [#11345]

• Since cosmologies are immutable, the initialization signature and values can be stored, greatly simplifying cloning logic and extending it to user-defined cosmology classes that do not have attributes with the same name as each initialization argument. [#11515]

• Cloning a cosmology with changed parameter(s) now appends “(modified)” to the new instance’s name, unless a name is explicitly passed to clone. [#11536]

• Allow m_nu to be input as any quantity-like or array-like – Quantity, array, float, str, etc. Input is passed to the Quantity constructor and converted to eV, still with the prior mass-energy equivalence enabled. [#11640]

astropy.io.fits

• For conversion between FITS tables and astropy Table, the standard mask values of NaN for float and null string for string are now properly recognized, leading to a MaskedColumn with appropriately set mask instead of a Column with those values exposed. Conversely, when writing an astropy Table to a FITS tables, masked values are now consistently converted to the standard FITS mask values of NaN for float and null string for string (i.e., not just for tables with masked=True, which no longer is guaranteed to signal the presence of MaskedColumn). [#11222]

astropy.io.votable

• The use of version='1.0' is now fully deprecated in constructing a astropy.io.votable.tree.VOTableFile. [#11659]

astropy.modeling

• Removed deprecated astropy.modeling.blackbody module. [#10972]

astropy.table

• Added Column.value as an alias for the existing Column.data attribute. This makes accessing a column’s underlying data array consistent with the .value attribute available for Time and Quantity objects. [#10962]

• In reading from a FITS tables, the standard mask values of NaN for float and null string for string are properly recognized, leading to a MaskedColumn with appropriately set mask. [#11222]

• Changed the implementation of the table.index.Index class so instantiating from this class now returns an Index object as expected instead of a SlicedIndex object. [#11333]

astropy.units

• The physical_type attribute of units now returns an instance of astropy.units.physical.PhysicalType instead of a string. Because PhysicalType instances can be compared to strings, no code changes should be necessary when making comparisons. The string representations of different physical types will differ from previous releases. [#11204]

• Calling Unit() with no argument now returns a dimensionless unit, as was documented but not implemented. [#11295]

astropy.utils

• Removed deprecated utils.misc.InheritDocstrings and utils.timer. [#10281]

• Removed usage of deprecated ipython stream in utils.console. [#10942]

astropy.wcs

• Deprecate accuracy argument in all_world2pix which was mistakenly documented, in the case accuracy was ever used. [#11055]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixes for convolve_fft documentation examples. [#11510]

astropy.coordinates

• Allow Distance instances with negative distance values as input for SphericalRepresentation. This was always noted as allowed in an exception message when a negative Quantity with length units was passed in, but was not actually possible to do. [#11113]

• Makes the Angle.to_string method to follow the format described in the docstring with up to 8 significant decimals instead of 4. [#11153]

• Ensure that proper motions can be calculated when converting a SkyCoord with cartesian representation to unit-spherical, by fixing the conversion of CartesianDifferential to UnitSphericalDifferential. [#11469]

• When re-representing coordinates from spherical to unit-spherical and vice versa, the type of differential will now be preserved. For instance, if only a radial velocity was present, that will remain the case (previously, a zero proper motion component was added). [#11482]

• Ensure that wrapping of Angle does not raise a warning even if nan are present. Also try to make sure that the result is within the wrapped range even in the presence of rounding errors. [#11568]

• Comparing a non-SkyCoord object to a SkyCoord using == no longer raises an error. [#11666]

• Different SkyOffsetFrame classes no longer interfere with each other, causing difficult to debug problems with the origin attribute. The origin attribute now no longer is propagated, so while it remains available on a SkyCoord that is an offset, it no longer is available once that coordinate is transformed to another frame. [#11730] [#11730]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmology instance names are now immutable. [#11535]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed bug where writing a table that has comments defined (via tbl.meta['comments']) with the ‘csv’ format was failing. Since the formally defined CSV format does not support comments, the comments are now just ignored unless comment=<comment prefix> is supplied to the write() call. [#11475]

• Fixed the issue where the CDS reader failed to treat columns as nullable if the ReadMe file contains a limits specifier. [#11531]

• Made sure that the CDS reader does not ignore an order specifier that may be present after the null specifier ‘?’. Also made sure that it checks null values only when an ‘=’ symbol is present and reads description text even if there is no whitespace after ‘?’. [#11593]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix ColDefs.add_col/del_col to allow in-place addition or removal of a column. [#11338]

• Fix indexing of fits.Header with Numpy integers. [#11387]

• Do not delete EXTNAME for compressed image header if a default and non-default EXTNAME are present. [#11396]

• Prevent warnings about HIERARCH with CompImageHeader class. [#11404]

• Fixed regression introduced in Astropy 4.0.5 and 4.2.1 with verification of FITS headers with HISTORY or COMMENT cards with long (> 72 characters) values. [#11487]

• Fix reading variable-length arrays when there is a gap between the data and the heap. [#11688]

astropy.io.votable

• NumericArray converter now properly broadcasts scalar mask to array. [#11157]

• VOTables are now written with the correct namespace and schema location attributes. [#11659]

astropy.modeling

• Fixes the improper propagation of bounding_box from astropy.modeling.models to their inverses. For cases in which the inverses bounding_box can be determined, the proper calculation has been implemented. [#11414]

• Bugfix to allow rotation models to accept arbitrarily-shaped inputs. [#11435]

• Bugfixes for astropy.modeling to allow fix_inputs to accept empty dictionaries and dictionaries with numpy integer keys. [#11443]

• Bugfix for how SPECIAL_OPERATORS are handled. [#11512]

• Fixes Model crashes when some inputs are scalars and during some types of output reshaping. [#11548]

• Fixed bug in LevMarLSQFitter when using weights and vector inputs. [#11603]

astropy.stats

• Fixed a bug with the copy=False option when carrying out sigma clipping - previously if masked=False this still copied the data, but this will now change the array in-place. [#11219]

astropy.table

• Ensure that adding a Quantity or other mixin column to a Table does not have side effects, such as creating an associated info instance (which would lead to slow-down of, e.g., slicing afterwards). [#11077]

• When writing to a FITS tables, masked values are again always converted to the standard FITS mask values of NaN for float and null string for string, not just for table with masked=True. [#11222]

• Using Table.to_pandas() on an indexed Table with masked integer values now correctly construct the pandas.DataFrame. [#11432]

• Fixed Table HTML representation in Jupyter notebooks so that it is horizontally scrollable within Visual Studio Code. This was done by wrapping the <table> in a <div> element. [#11476]

• Fix a bug where a string-valued Column that happened to have a unit attribute could not be added to a QTable. Such columns are now simply kept as Column instances (with a warning). [#11585]

• Fix an issue in Table.to_pandas(index=<colname>) where the index column name was not being set properly for the DataFrame index. This was introduced by an API change in pandas version 1.3.0. Previously when creating a DataFrame with the index set to an astropy Column, the DataFrame index name was automatically set to the column name. [#11921]

astropy.time

• Fix a thread-safety issue with initialization of the leap-second table (which is only an issue when ERFA’s built-in table is out of date). [#11234]

• Fixed converting a zero-length time object from UTC to UT1 when an empty array is passed. [#11516]

astropy.uncertainty

• Distribution instances can now be used as input to Quantity to initialize QuantityDistribution. Hence, distribution * unit and distribution << unit will work too. [#11210]

astropy.units

• Move non-astronomy units from astrophys.py to a new misc.py file. [#11142]

• The physical type of astropy.units.mol / astropy.units.m ** 3 is now defined as molar concentration. It was previously incorrectly defined as molar volume. [#11204]

• Make ufunc helper lookup thread-safe. [#11226]

• Make Unit string parsing (as well as Angle parsing) thread-safe. [#11227]

• Decorator astropy.units.decorators.quantity_input now only evaluates return type annotations based on UnitBase or FunctionUnitBase types. Other annotations are skipped over and are not attempted to convert to the correct type. [#11506]

astropy.utils

• Make lazyproperty and classdecorator thread-safe. This should fix a number of thread safety issues. [#11224]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug that resulted in some parts of grid lines being visible when they should have been hidden. [#11380]

• Fixed a bug that resulted in time_support() failing for intervals of a few months if one of the ticks was the month December. [#11615]

astropy.wcs

• fit_wcs_from_points now produces a WCS with integer NAXIXn values. [#10865]

• Updated bundled version of WCSLIB to v7.4, fixing a bug that caused the coefficients of the TPD distortion function to not be written to the header. [#11260]

• Fixed a bug in assigning type when converting colsel to numpy.ndarray. [#11431]

• Added WCSCOMPARE_* constants to the list of WCSLIB constants available/exposed through the astropy.wcs module. [#11647]

• Fix a bug that caused APE 14 WCS transformations for FITS WCS with ZOPT, BETA, VELO, VOPT, or VRAD CTYPE to not work correctly. [#11781]

Other Changes and Additions

• The configuration file is no longer created by default when importing astropy and its existence is no longer required. Affiliated packages should update their __init__.py module to remove the block using update_default_config and ConfigurationDefaultMissingWarning. [#10877]

• Replace pkg_resources (from setuptools) with importlib.metadata which comes from the stdlib, except for Python 3.7 where the backport package is added as a new dependency. [#11091]

• Turn on numpydoc’s numpydoc_xref_param_type to create cross-references for the parameter types in the Parameters, Other Parameters, Returns and Yields sections of the docstrings. [#11118]

• Docstrings across the package are standardized to enable references. Also added is an Astropy glossary-of-terms to define standard inputs, e.g. quantity-like indicates an input that can be interpreted by astropy.units.Quantity. [#11118]

• Binary wheels are now built to the manylinux2010 specification. These wheels should be supported on all versions of pip shipped with Python 3.7+. [#11377]

• The name of the default branch for the astropy git repository has been renamed to main, and the documentation and tooling has been updated accordingly. If you have made a local clone you may wish to update it following the instructions in the repository’s README. [#11379]

• Sphinx cross-reference link targets are added for every PhysicalType. Now in the parameter types in the Parameters, Other Parameters, Returns and Yields sections of the docstring, the physical type of a quantity can be annotated in square brackets. E.g. `` distance : Quantity [‘length’] `` [#11595]

• The minimum supported version of ipython is now 4.2. [#10942]

• The minimum supported version of pyerfa is now 1.7.3. [#11637]

Version 4.2.1 (2021-04-01)

Bug Fixes

astropy.cosmology

• Fixed an issue where specializations of the comoving distance calculation for certain cosmologies could not handle redshift arrays. [#10980]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix bug where manual fixes to invalid header cards were not preserved when saving a FITS file. [#11108]

astropy.io.votable

• NumericArray converter now properly broadcasts scalar mask to array. [#11157]

astropy.table

• Fix bug when initializing a Table subclass that uses TableAttribute’s. If the data were an instance of the table then attributes provided in the table initialization call could be ignored. [#11217]

astropy.time

• Change epoch of TimeUnixTAI ("unix_tai") from 1970-01-01T00:00:00 UTC to 1970-01-01T00:00:00 TAI to match the intended and documented behaviour. This essentially changes the resulting times by 8.000082 seconds, the initial offset between TAI and UTC. [#11249]

astropy.units

• Fixed a bug with the quantity_input decorator where allowing dimensionless inputs for an argument inadvertently disabled any checking of compatible units for that argument. [#11283]

astropy.utils

• Fix a bug so that np.shape, np.ndim and np.size again work on classes that use ShapedLikeNDArray, like representations, frames, sky coordinates, and times. [#11133]

astropy.wcs

• Fix error when a user defined proj_point parameter is passed to fit_wcs_from_points. [#11139]

Other Changes and Additions

• Change epoch of TimeUnixTAI ("unix_tai") from 1970-01-01T00:00:00 UTC to 1970-01-01T00:00:00 TAI to match the intended and documented behaviour. This essentially changes the resulting times by 8.000082 seconds, the initial offset between TAI and UTC. [#11249]

Version 4.2 (2020-11-24)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• Methods convolve and convolve_fft both now return Quantity arrays if user input is given in one. [#10822]

astropy.coordinates

• Numpy functions that broadcast, change shape, or index (like np.broadcast_to, np.rot90, or np.roll) now work on coordinates, frames, and representations. [#10337]

• Add a new science state astropy.coordinates.erfa_astrom.erfa_astrom and two classes ErfaAstrom, ErfaAstromInterpolator as wrappers to the pyerfa astrometric functions used in the coordinate transforms. Using ErfaAstromInterpolator, which interpolates astrometric properties for SkyCoord instances with arrays of obstime, can dramatically speed up coordinate transformations while keeping microarcsecond resolution. Depending on needed precision and the obstime array in question, speed ups reach factors of 10x to >100x. [#10647]

• galactocentric_frame_defaults can now also be used as a registry, with user-defined parameter values and metadata. [#10624]

• Method .realize_frame from coordinate frames now accepts **kwargs, including representation_type. [#10727]

• Avoid an unnecessary call to erfa.epv00 in transformations between CIRS and ICRS, improving performance by 50 %. [#10814]

• A new equatorial coordinate frame, with RA and Dec measured w.r.t to the True Equator and Equinox (TETE). This frame is commonly known as “apparent place” and is the correct frame for coordinates returned from JPL Horizons. [#10867]

• Added a context manager impose_finite_difference_dt to the TransformGraph class to override the finite-difference time step attribute (finite_difference_dt) for all transformations in the graph with that attribute. [#10341]

• Improve performance of SpectralCoord by refactoring internal implementation. [#10398]

astropy.cosmology

• The final version of the Planck 2018 cosmological parameters are included as the Planck18 object, which is now the default cosmology. The parameters are identical to those of the Planck18_arXiv_v2 object, which is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. [#10915]

astropy.modeling

• Added NFW profile and tests to modeling package [#10505]

• Added missing logic for evaluate to compound models [#10002]

• Stop iteration in FittingWithOutlierRemoval before reaching niter if the masked points are no longer changing. [#10642]

• Keep a (shallow) copy of fit_info from the last iteration of the wrapped fitter in FittingWithOutlierRemoval and also record the actual number of iterations performed in it. [#10642]

• Added attributes for fitting uncertainties (covariance matrix, standard deviations) to models. Parameter covariance matrix can be accessed via model.cov_matrix, standard deviations by model.stds or individually for each parameter by parameter.std. Currently implemented for LinearLSQFitter and LevMarLSQFitter. [#10552]

• N-dimensional least-squares statistic and specific 1,2,3-D methods [#10670]

astropy.stats

• Added circstd function to obtain a circular standard deviation. [#10690]

astropy.table

• Allow initializing a Table using a list of names in conjunction with a dtype from a numpy structured array. The list of names overrides the names specified in the dtype. [#10419]

astropy.time

• Add new isclose() method to Time and TimeDelta classes to allow comparison of time objects to within a specified tolerance. [#10646]

• Improve initialization time by a factor of four when creating a scalar Time object in a format like unix or cxcsec (time delta from a reference epoch time). [#10406]

• Improve initialization time by a factor of ~25 or more for large arrays of string times in ISO, ISOT or year day-of-year formats. This is done with a new C-based time parser that can be adapted for other fixed-format custom time formats. [#10360]

• Numpy functions that broadcast, change shape, or index (like np.broadcast_to, np.rot90, or np.roll) now work on times. [#10337, #10502]

astropy.timeseries

• Improve memory and speed performance when iterating over the entire time column of a TimeSeries object. Previously this involved O(N^2) operations and memory. [#10889]

astropy.units

• Quantity.to has gained a copy option to allow copies to be avoided when the units do not change. [#10517]

• Added the spat unit of solid angle that represents the full sphere. [#10726]

astropy.utils

• ShapedLikeNDArray has gained the capability to use numpy functions that broadcast, change shape, or index. [#10337]

• get_free_space_in_dir now takes a new unit keyword and check_free_space_in_dir takes size defined as Quantity. [#10627]

• New astropy.utils.data.conf.allow_internet configuration item to control downloading data from the Internet. Setting allow_internet=False is the same as remote_timeout=0. Using remote_timeout=0 to control internet access will stop working in a future release. [#10632]

• New is_url function so downstream packages do not have to secretly use the hidden _is_url anymore. [#10684]

astropy.visualization

• Added the Quadrangle patch for WCSAxes for a latitude-longitude quadrangle. Unlike matplotlib.patches.Rectangle, the edges of this patch will be rendered as curved lines if appropriate for the WCS transformation. [#10862]

• The position of tick labels are now only calculated when needed. If any text parameters are changed (color, font weight, size etc.) that don’t effect the tick label position, the positions are not recomputed, improving performance. [#10806]

astropy.wcs

• WCS.to_header() now appends comments to SIP coefficients. [#10480]

• A new property dropped_world_dimensions has been added to SlicedLowLevelWCS to record information about any world axes removed by slicing a WCS. [#10195]

• New WCS.proj_plane_pixel_scales() and WCS.proj_plane_pixel_area() methods to return pixel scales and area, respectively, as Quantity. [#10872]

API Changes

astropy.config

• set_temp_config now preserves the existing cache rather than deleting it and relying on reloading it from the previous config file. This ensures that any programmatically made changes are preserved as well. [#10474]

• Configuration path detection logic has changed: Now, it looks for ~ first before falling back to older logic. In addition, HOMESHARE is no longer used in Windows. [#10705]

astropy.coordinates

• The passing of frame classes (as opposed to frame instances) to the transform_to() methods of low-level coordinate-frame classes has been deprecated. Frame classes can still be passed to the transform_to() method of the high-level SkyCoord class, and using SkyCoord is recommended for all typical use cases of transforming coordinates. [#10475]

astropy.stats

• Added a grow parameter to SigmaClip, sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats, to allow expanding the masking of each deviant value to its neighbours within a specified radius. [#10613]

• Passing float n to poisson_conf_interval when using interval='kraft-burrows-nousek' now raises TypeError as its value must be an integer. [#10838]

astropy.table

• Change Table.columns.keys() and Table.columns.values() to both return generators instead of a list. This matches the behavior for Python dict objects. [#10543]

• Removed the FastBST and FastRBT indexing engines because they depend on the bintrees package, which is no longer maintained and is deprecated. Instead, use the SCEngine indexing engine, which is similar in performance and relies on the sortedcontainers package. [#10622]

• When slicing a mixin column in a table that had indices, the indices are no longer copied since they generally are not useful, having the wrong shape. With this, the behaviour becomes the same as that for a regular Column. (Note that this does not affect slicing of a table; sliced columns in those will continue to carry a sliced version of any indices). [#10890]

• Change behavior so that when getting a single item out of a mixin column such as Time, TimeDelta, SkyCoord or Quantity, the info attribute is no longer copied. This improves performance, especially when the object is an indexed column in a Table. [#10889]

• Raise a TypeError when a scalar column is added to an unsized table. [#10476]

• The order of columns when creating a table from a list of dict may be changed. Previously, the order was alphabetical because the dict keys were assumed to be in random order. Since Python 3.7, the keys are always in order of insertion, so Table now uses the order of keys in the first row to set the column order. To alphabetize the columns to match the previous behavior, use t = t[sorted(t.colnames)]. [#10900]

astropy.time

• Refactor Time and TimeDelta classes to inherit from a common TimeBase class. The TimeDelta class no longer inherits from Time. A number of methods that only apply to Time (e.g. light_travel_time) are no longer available in the TimeDelta class. [#10656]

astropy.units

• The bar unit is no longer wrongly considered an SI unit, meaning that SI decompositions like (u.kg*u.s**-2* u.sr**-1 * u.nm**-1).si will no longer include it. [#10586]

astropy.utils

• Shape-related items from astropy.utils.misc – ShapedLikeNDArray, check_broadcast, unbroadcast, and IncompatibleShapeError – have been moved to their own module, astropy.utils.shapes. They remain importable from astropy.utils. [#10337]

• check_hashes keyword in check_download_cache is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. [#10628]

• hexdigest keyword in import_file_to_cache is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. [#10628]

Bug Fixes

astropy.config

• Fix a few issues with generate_config when used with other packages. [#10893]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug in the coordinate-frame attribute CoordinateAttribute where the internal transformation could behave differently depending on whether the input was a low-level coordinate frame or a high-level SkyCoord. CoordinateAttribute now always performs a SkyCoord-style internal transformation, including the by-default merging of frame attributes. [#10475]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed an issue of Model.render when the input out datatype is not float64. [#10542]

astropy.visualization

• Fix support for referencing WCSAxes coordinates by their world axes names. [#10484]

astropy.wcs

• Objective functions called by astropy.wcs.fit_wcs_from_points were treating longitude and latitude distances equally. Now longitude scaled properly. [#10759]

Other Changes and Additions

• Minimum version of required Python is now 3.7. [#10900]

• Minimum version of required Numpy is now 1.17. [#10664]

• Minimum version of required Scipy is now 1.1. [#10900]

• Minimum version of required PyYAML is now 3.13. [#10900]

• Minimum version of required Matplotlib is now 3.0. [#10900]

• The private _erfa module has been converted to its own package, pyerfa, which is a required dependency for astropy, and can be imported with import erfa. Importing _erfa from astropy will give a deprecation warning. [#10329]

• Added optimize=True flag to calls of yacc.yacc (as already done for lex.lex) to allow running in python -OO session without raising an exception in astropy.units.format. [#10379]

• Shortened FITS comment strings for some D2IM and CPDIS FITS keywords to reduce the number of FITS VerifyWarning warnings when working with WCSes containing lookup table distortions. [#10513]

• When importing astropy without first building the extension modules first, raise an error directly instead of trying to auto-build. [#10883]

Version 4.1 (2020-10-21)

New Features

astropy.config

• Add new function generate_config to generate the configuration file and include it in the documentation. [#10148]

• ConfigNamespace.__iter__ and ConfigNamespace.keys now yield ConfigItem names defined within it. Similarly, items and values would yield like a Python dictionary would. [#10139]

astropy.coordinates

• Added a new SpectralCoord class that can be used to define spectral coordinates and transform them between different velocity frames. [#10185]

• Angle parsing now supports cardinal direction in the cases where angles are initialized as string instances. eg "17°53'27"W".[#9859]

• Allow in-place modification of array-valued Frame and SkyCoord objects. This provides limited support for updating coordinate data values from another coordinate object of the same class and equivalent frame attributes. [#9857]

• Added a robust equality operator for comparing SkyCoord, frame, and representation objects. A comparison like sc1 == sc2 will now return a boolean or boolean array where the objects are strictly equal in all relevant frame attributes and coordinate representation values. [#10154]

• Added the True Equator Mean Equinox (TEME) frame. [#10149]

• The Galactocentric frame will now use the “latest” parameter definitions by default. This currently corresponds to the values defined in v4.0, but will change with future releases. [#10238]

• The SkyCoord.from_name() and Sesame name resolving functionality now is able to cache results locally and will do so by default. [#9162]

• Allow in-place modification of array-valued Representation and Differential objects, including of representations with attached differentials. [#10210]

astropy.io.ascii

• Functional Units can now be processed in CDS-tables. [#9971]

• Allow reading in ASCII tables which have duplicate column names. [#9939]

• Fixed failure of ASCII fast_reader to handle names, include_names, exclude_names arguments for RDB formatted tables. Homogenised checks and exceptions for invalid names arguments. Improved performance when parsing “wide” tables with many columns. [#10306]

• Added type validation of key arguments in calls to io.ascii.read() and io.ascii.write() functions. [#10005]

astropy.io.misc

• Added serialization of parameter constraints fixed and bounds. [#10082]

• Added ‘functional_models.py’ and ‘physical_models.py’ to asdf/tags/transform, with to allow serialization of all functional and physical models. [#10028, #10293]

• Fix ASDF serialization of circular model inverses, and remove explicit calls to asdf.yamlutil functions that became unnecessary in asdf 2.6.0. [#10189, #10384]

astropy.io.fits

• Added support for writing Dask arrays to disk efficiently for ImageHDU and PrimaryHDU. [#9742]

• Add HDU name and ver to FITSDiff report where appropriate [#10197]

astropy.io.votable

• New exceptions.conf.max_warnings configuration item to control the number of times a type of warning appears before being suppressed. [#10152]

• No longer ignore attributes whose values were specified as empty strings. [#10583]

astropy.modeling

• Added Plummer1D model to functional_models. [#9896]

• Added UnitsMapping model and Model.coerce_units to support units on otherwise unitless models. [#9936]

• Added domain and window attributes to repr and str. Fixed bug with _format_repr in core.py. [#9941]

• Polynomial attributes domain and window are now tuples of size 2 and are validated. repr and print show only their non-default values. [#10145]

• Added replace_submodel() method to CompoundModel to modify an existing instance. [#10176]

• Delay construction of CompoundModel inverse until property is accessed, to support ASDF deserialization of circular inverses in component models. [#10384]

astropy.nddata

• Added support in the bitmask module for using mnemonic bit flag names when specifying the bit flags to be used or ignored when converting a bit field to a boolean. [#10095, #10208]

• Added reshape_as_blocks function to reshape a data array into blocks, which is useful to efficiently apply functions on block subsets of the data instead of using loops. The reshaped array is a view of the input data array. [#10214]

• Added a cache keyword option to allow caching for CCDData.read if filename is a URL. [#10265]

astropy.table

• Added ability to specify a custom matching function for table joins. In particular this makes it possible to do cross-match table joins on SkyCoord, Quantity, or standard columns, where column entries within a specified distance are considered to be matched. [#10169]

• Added units and descriptions keyword arguments to the Table object initialization and Table.read() methods. This allows directly setting the unit and description for the table columns at the time of creating or reading the table. [#9671]

• Make table Row work as mappings, by adding .keys() and .values() methods. With this **row becomes possible, as does, more simply, turning a Row into a dictionary with dict(row). [#9712]

• Added two new Table methods .items() and .values(), which return respectively tbl.columns.items() (iterator over name, column tuples) and tbl.columns.values() (list of columns) for a Table object tbl. [#9780]

• Added new Table method .round(), which rounds numeric columns to the specified number of decimals. [#9862]

• Updated to_pandas() and from_pandas() to use and support Pandas nullable integer data type for masked integer data. [#9541]

• The HDF5 writer, write_table_hdf5(), now allows passing through additional keyword arguments to the h5py.Group.create_dataset(). [#9602]

• Added capability to add custom table attributes to a Table subclass. These attributes are persistent and can be set during table creation. [#10097]

• Added support for SkyCoord mixin columns in dstack, vstack and insert_row functions. [#9857]

• Added support for coordinate Representation and Differential mixin columns. [#10210]

astropy.time

• Added a new time format unix_tai which is essentially Unix time but with leap seconds included. More precisely, this is the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:08 TAI and corresponds to the CLOCK_TAI clock available on some linux platforms. [#10081]

astropy.units

• Added torr pressure unit. [#9787]

• Added the equal_nan keyword argument to isclose and allclose, and updated the docstrings. [#9849]

• Added Rankine temperature unit. [#9916]

• Added integrated flux unit conversion to spectral_density equivalency. [#10015]

• Changed pixel_scale equivalency to allow scales defined in any unit. [#10123]

• The quantity_input decorator now optionally allows passing through numeric values or numpy arrays with numeric dtypes to arguments where dimensionless_unscaled is an allowed unit. [#10232]

astropy.utils

• Added a new MetaAttribute class to support easily adding custom attributes to a subclass of classes like Table or NDData that have a meta attribute. [#10097]

astropy.visualization

• Added invalid keyword to SqrtStretch, LogStretch, PowerStretch, and ImageNormalize classes and the simple_norm function. This keyword is used to replace generated NaN values. [#10182]

• Fixed an issue where ticks were sometimes not drawn at the edges of a spherical projection on a WCSAxes. [#10442]

astropy.wcs

• WCS objects with a spectral axis will now return SpectralCoord objects when calling pixel_to_world instead of Quantity, and can now take either Quantity or SpectralCoord as input to pixel_to_world. [#10185]

• Implemented support for the -TAB algorithm (WCS Paper III). [#9641]

• Added an _as_mpl_axes method to the HightLevelWCSWrapper class. [#10138]

• Add .upper() to ctype or ctype names to wcsapi/fitwcs.py to mitigate bugs from unintended lower/upper case issues [#10557]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• The equality operator for comparing SkyCoord, frame, and representation objects was changed. A comparison like sc1 == sc2 was previously equivalent to sc1 is sc2. It will now return a boolean or boolean array where the objects are strictly equal in all relevant frame attributes and coordinate representation values. If the objects have different frame attributes or representation types then an exception will be raised. [#10154]

• `SkyCoord.radial_velocity_correction` now allows you to pass an `obstime` directly when the `SkyCoord` also has an `obstime` set. In this situation, the position of the `SkyCoord` has space motion applied to correct to the passed `obstime`. This allows mm/s radial velocity precision for objects with large space motion. [#10094]

• For consistency with other astropy classes, coordinate Representations and Differentials can now be initialized with an instance of their own class if that instance is passed in as the first argument. [#10210]

astropy.io.ascii

• Changed the behavior when reading a table where both the names argument is provided (to specify the output column names) and the converters argument is provided (to specify column conversion functions). Previously the converters dict names referred to the input table column names, but now they refer to the output table column names. [#9739]

astropy.io.votable

• For FIELDs with datatype=”char”, store the values as strings instead of bytes. [#9505]

astropy.table

• Table.from_pandas now supports a units dictionary as argument to pass units for columns in the DataFrame. [#9472]

astropy.time

• Require that in_subfmt and out_subfmt properties of a Time object have allowed values at the time of being set, either when creating the object or when setting those properties on an existing Time instance. Previously the validation of those properties was not strictly enforced. [#9868]

astropy.utils

• Changed the exception raised by get_readable_fileobj on missing compression modules (for bz2 or lzma/xz support) to ModuleNotFoundError, consistent with io.fits file handlers. [#9761]

astropy.visualization

• Deprecated the imshow_only_kwargs keyword in imshow_norm. [#9915]

• Non-finite input values are now automatically excluded in HistEqStretch and InvertedHistEqStretch. [#10177]

• The PowerDistStretch and InvertedPowerDistStretch a value is restricted to be a >= 0 in addition to a != 1. [#10177]

• The PowerStretch, LogStretch, and InvertedLogStretch a value is restricted to be a > 0. [#10177]

• The AsinhStretch and SinhStretch a value is restricted to be 0 < a <= 1. [#10177]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fix a bug where for light deflection by the Sun it was always assumed that the source was at infinite distance, which in the (rare and) absolute worst-case scenario could lead to errors up to 3 arcsec. [#10666]

astropy.io.votable

• For FIELDs with datatype=”char”, store the values as strings instead of bytes. [#9505]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug that prevented Time columns from being used to sort a table. [#10824]

astropy.wcs

• WCS objects with a spectral axis will now return SpectralCoord objects when calling pixel_to_world instead of Quantity (note that SpectralCoord is a sub-class of Quantity). [#10185]

• Add .upper() to ctype or ctype names to wcsapi/fitwcs.py to mitigate bugs from unintended lower/upper case issues [#10557]

• Added bounds to fit_wcs_from_points to ensure CRPIX is on input image. [#10346]

Other Changes and Additions

• The way in which users can specify whether to build astropy against existing installations of C libraries rather than the bundled one has changed, and should now be done via environment variables rather than setup.py flags (e.g. –use-system-erfa). The available variables are ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_CFITSIO, ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_ERFA, ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_EXPAT, ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_WCSLIB, and ASTROPY_USE_SYSTEM_ALL. These should be set to 1 to build against the system libraries. [#9730]

• The infrastructure of the package has been updated in line with the APE 17 roadmap (astropy/astropy-APEs). The main changes are that the python setup.py test and python setup.py build_docs commands will no longer work. The easiest way to replicate these commands is to install the tox (https://tox.readthedocs.io) package and run tox -e test and tox -e build_docs. It is also possible to run pytest and sphinx directly. Other significant changes include switching to setuptools_scm to manage the version number, and adding a pyproject.toml to opt in to isolated builds as described in PEP 517/518. [#9726]

• Bundled expat is updated to version 2.2.9. [#10038]

• Increase minimum asdf version to 2.6.0. [#10189]

• The bundled version of PLY was updated to 3.11. [#10258]

• Removed dependency on scikit-image. [#10214]

Version 4.0.5 (2021-03-26)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fix bug where manual fixes to invalid header cards were not preserved when saving a FITS file. [#11108]

• Fix parsing of RVKC header card patterns that were not recognised where multiple spaces were separating field-specifier and value like “DP1.AXIS.1: 1”. [#11301]

• Fix misleading missing END card error when extra data are found at the end of the file. [#11285]

• Fix incorrect wrapping of long card values as CONTINUE cards when some words in the value are longer than a single card. [#11304]

astropy.io.misc

• Fixed problem when writing serialized metadata to HDF5 using h5py >= 3.0. With the newer h5py this was writing the metadata table as a variable-length string array instead of the previous fixed-length bytes array. Fixed astropy to force using a fixed-length bytes array. [#11359]

astropy.modeling

• Change Voigt1D function to use Humlicek’s approximation to avoid serious inaccuracies + option to use (compiled) scipy.special.wofz error function for yet more accurate results. [#11177]

astropy.table

• Fixed bug when initializing a Table with a column as list of Quantity, for example Table({'x': [1*u.m, 2*u.m]}). Previously this resulted in an object dtype with no column unit set, but now gives a float array with the correct unit. [#11329]

• Fixed byteorder conversion in to_pandas(), which had incorrectly triggered swapping when native endianness was stored with explicit dtype code '<' (or '>') instead of '='. [#11288, #11294]

• Fixed a compatibility issue with numpy 1.21. Initializing a Table with a column like ['str', np.ma.masked] was failing in tests due to a change in numpy. [#11364]

• Fixed bug when validating the inputs to table.hstack, table.vstack, and table.dstack. Previously, mistakenly calling table.hstack(t1, t2) (instead of table.hstack([t1, t2])) would return t1 instead of raising an exception. [#11336]

• Fixed byteorder conversion in to_pandas(), which had incorrectly triggered swapping when native endianness was stored with explicit dtype code '<' (or '>') instead of '='. [#11288]

astropy.time

• Fix leap second update when using a non english locale. [#11062]

• Fix default assumed location to be the geocenter when transforming times to and from solar-system barycenter scales. [#11134]

• Fix inability to write masked times with formatted_value. [#11195]

astropy.units

• Ensure keepdims works for taking mean, std, and var of Quantity. [#11198]

• For Quantity.to_string(), ensure that the precision argument is also used when the format is not latex. [#11145]

astropy.wcs

• Allow “un-setting” of auxiliary WCS parameters in the aux attribute of Wcsprm. [#11166]

Version 4.0.4 (2020-11-24)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• The norm() method for RadialDifferential no longer requires base to be specified. The norm() method for other non-Cartesian differential classes now gives a clearer error message if base is not specified. [#10969]

• The transformations between ICRS and any of the heliocentric ecliptic frames (HeliocentricMeanEcliptic, HeliocentricTrueEcliptic, and HeliocentricEclipticIAU76) now correctly account for the small motion of the Sun when transforming a coordinate with velocity information. [#10970]

astropy.io.ascii

• Partially fixed a performance issue when reading in parallel mode. Parallel reading currently has substantially worse performance than the default serial reading, so we now ignore the parallel option and fall back to serial reading. [#10880]

• Fixed a bug where “” (blank string) as input data for a boolean type column was causing an exception instead of indicating a masked value. As a consequence of the fix, the values “0” and “1” are now also allowed as valid inputs for boolean type columns. These new allowed values apply for both ECSV and for basic character-delimited data files (‘basic’ format with appropriate converters specified). [#10995]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed use of weights with LinearLSQFitter. [#10687]

astropy.stats

• Fixed an issue in biweight stats when MAD=0 to give the same output with and without an input axis. [#10912]

astropy.time

• Fix a problem with the plot_date format for matplotlib >= 3.3 caused by a change in the matplotlib plot date default reference epoch in that release. [#10876]

• Improve initialization time by a factor of four when creating a scalar Time object in a format like unix or cxcsec (time delta from a reference epoch time). [#10406]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed the calculation of the tight bounding box of a WCSAxes. This should also significantly improve the application of tight_layout() to figures containing WCSAxes. [#10797]

Version 4.0.3 (2020-10-14)

Bug Fixes

astropy.table

• Fixed a small bug where initializing an empty Column with a structured dtype with a length and a shape failed to give the requested dtype. [#10819]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed installation of the source distribution with pip<19. [#10837, #10852]

Version 4.0.2 (2020-10-10)

New Features

astropy.utils

• astropy.utils.data.download_file now supports FTPS/FTP over TLS. [#9964]

• astropy.utils.data now uses a lock-free mechanism for caching. This new mechanism uses a new cache layout and so ignores caches created using earlier mechanisms (which were causing lockups on clusters). The two cache formats can coexist but do not share any files. [#10437, #10683]

• astropy.utils.data now ignores the config item astropy.utils.data.conf.download_cache_lock_attempts since no locking is done. [#10437, #10683]

• astropy.utils.data.download_file and related functions now interpret the parameter or config file setting timeout=0 to mean they should make no attempt to download files. [#10437, #10683]

• astropy.utils.import_file_to_cache now accepts a keyword-only argument replace, defaulting to True, to determine whether it should replace existing files in the cache, in a way as close to atomic as possible. [#10437, #10683]

• astropy.utils.data.download_file and related functions now treat http://example.com and http://example.com/ as equivalent. [#10631]

astropy.wcs

• The new auxiliary WCS parameters added in WCSLIB 7.1 are now exposed as the aux attribute of Wcsprm. [#10333]

• Updated bundled version of WCSLIB to v7.3. [#10433]

Bug fixes

astropy.config

• Added an extra fallback to os.expanduser('~') when trying to find the user home directory. [#10570]

astropy.constants

• Corrected definition of parsec to 648 000 / pi AU following IAU 2015 B2 [#10569]

astropy.convolution

• Fixed a bug where a float-typed integers in the argument x_range of astropy.convolution.utils.discretize_oversample_1D (and the 2D version as well) fails because it uses numpy.linspace, which requires an int. [#10696]

astropy.coordinates

• Ensure that for size-1 array SkyCoord and coordinate frames the attributes also properly become scalars when indexed with 0. [#10113]

• Fixed a bug where SkyCoord.separation() and SkyCoord.separation_3d were not accepting a frame object. [#10332]

• Ensure that the lon values in SkyOffsetFrame are wrapped correctly at 180 degree regardless of how the underlying data is represented. [#10163]

• Fixed an error in the obliquity of the ecliptic when transforming to/from the *TrueEcliptic coordinate frames. The error would primarily result in an inaccuracy in the ecliptic latitude on the order of arcseconds. [#10129]

• Fixed an error in the computation of the location of solar system bodies where the Earth location of the observer was ignored during the correction for light travel time. [#10292]

• Ensure that coordinates with proper motion that are transformed to other coordinate frames still can be represented properly. [#10276]

• Improve the error message given when trying to get a cartesian representation for coordinates that have both proper motion and radial velocity, but no distance. [#10276]

• Fixed an error where SkyCoord.apply_space_motion would return incorrect results when no distance is set and proper motion is high. [#10296]

• Make the parsing of angles thread-safe so that Angle can be used in Python multithreading. [#10556]

• Fixed reporting of EarthLocation.info which previously raised an exception. [#10592]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a bug with the C fast_reader not correctly parsing newlines when delimiter was also set to \n or \r; ensured consistent handling of input strings without newline characters. [#9929]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix integer formats of TFORMn=Iw columns in ASCII tables to correctly read values exceeding int32 - setting int16, int32 or int64 according to w. [#9901]

• Fix unclosed memory-mapped FITS files in FITSDiff when difference found. [#10159]

• Fix crash when reading an invalid table file. [#10171]

• Fix duplication issue when setting a keyword ending with space. [#10482]

• Fix ResourceWarning with fits.writeto and pathlib.Path object. [#10599]

• Fix repr for commentary cards and strip spaces for commentary keywords. [#10640]

• Fix compilation of cfitsio with Xcode 12. [#10772]

• Fix handling of 1-dimensional arrays with a single element in BinTableHDU [#10768]

astropy.io.misc

• Fix id URL in baseframe-1.0.0 ASDF schema. [#10223]

• Write keys to ASDF only if the value is present, to account for a change in behavior in asdf 2.8. [#10674]

astropy.io.registry

• Fix Table.(read|write).help when reader or writer has no docstring. [#10460]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed parsing failure of VOTable with no fields. When detecting a non-empty table with no fields, the following warning/exception is issued: E25 “No FIELDs are defined; DATA section will be ignored.” [#10192]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a problem with mapping input_units and return_units of a CompoundModel to the units of the constituent models. [#10158]

• Removed hard-coded names of inputs and outputs. [#10174]

• Fixed a problem where slicing a CompoundModel by name will crash if there fix_inputs operators are present. [#10224]

• Removed a limitation of fitting of data with units with compound models without units when the expression involves operators other than addition and subtraction. [#10415]

• Fixed a problem with fitting Linear1D and Planar2D in model sets. [#10623]

• Fixed reported module name of math_functions model classes. [#10694]

• Fixed reported module name of tabular model classes. [#10709]

• Do not create new math_functions models for ufuncs that are only aliases (divide and mod). [#10697]

• Fix calculation of the Moffat2D derivative with respect to gamma. [#10784]

astropy.stats

• Fixed an API regression where SigmaClip.__call__ would convert masked elements to nan and upcast the dtype to float64 in its output MaskedArray when using the axis parameter along with the defaults masked=True and copy=True. [#10610]

• Fixed an issue where fully masked MaskedArray input to sigma_clipped_stats gave incorrect results. [#10099]

• Fixed an issue where sigma_clip and SigmaClip.__call__ would return a masked array instead of a ndarray when masked=False and the input was a full-masked MaskedArray. [#10099]

• Fixed bug with funcs.poisson_conf_interval where an integer for N with interval='kraft-burrows-nousek' would throw an error with mpmath backend. [#10427]

• Fixed bug in funcs.poisson_conf_interval with interval='kraft-burrows-nousek' where certain combinations of source and background count numbers led to ValueError due to the choice of starting value for numerical optimization. [#10618]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug when writing a table with mixin columns to FITS, ECSV or HDF5. If one of the data attributes of the mixin (e.g. skycoord.ra) had the same name as one of the table column names (ra), the column (ra) would be dropped when reading the table back. [#10222]

• Fixed a bug when sorting an indexed table on the indexed column after first sorting on another column. [#10103]

• Fixed a bug in table argsort when called with reverse=True for an indexed table. [#10103]

• Fixed a performance regression introduced in #9048 when initializing a table from Python lists. Also fixed incorrect behavior (for data types other than float) when those lists contain np.ma.masked elements to indicate masked data. [#10636]

• Avoid modifying .meta when serializing columns to FITS. [#10485]

• Avoid crash when reading a FITS table that contains mixin info and PyYAML is missing. [#10485]

astropy.time

• Ensure that for size-1 array Time, the location also properly becomes a scalar when indexed with 0. [#10113]

astropy.units

• Refined test_parallax to resolve difference between 2012 and 2015 definitions. [#10569]

astropy.utils

• The default IERS server has been updated to use the FTPS server hosted by CDDIS. [#9964]

• Fixed memory allocation on 64-bit systems within xml.iterparse [#10076]

• Fix case where None could be used in a numerical computation. [#10126]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug where the ImageNormalize clip keyword was ignored when used with calling the object on data. [#10098]

• Fixed a bug where axes.xlabel/axes.ylabel where not correctly set nor returned on an EllipticalFrame class WCSAxes plot. [#10446]

astropy.wcs

• Handled WCS 360 -> 0 deg crossover in fit_wcs_from_points [#10155]

• Do not issue DATREF warning when MJDREF has default value. [#10440]

• Fixed a bug due to which naxis argument was ignored if header was supplied during the initialization of a WCS object. [#10532]

Other Changes and Additions

• Improved the speed of sorting a large Table on a single column by a factor of around 5. [#10103]

• Ensure that astropy can be used inside Application bundles built with pyinstaller. [#8795]

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.49. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#10256, #10665]

• extract_array raises a ValueError if the data type of the input array is inconsistent with the fill_value. [#10602]

Version 4.0.1 (2020-03-27)

Bug fixes

astropy.config

• Fixed a bug where importing a development version of a package that uses astropy configuration system can result in a ~/.astropy/config/package..cfg file. [#9975]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug where a vestigal trace of a frame class could persist in the transformation graph even after the removal of all transformations involving that frame class. [#9815]

• Fixed a bug with TransformGraph.remove_transform() when the “from” and “to” frame classes are not explicitly specified. [#9815]

• Read-only longitudes can now be passed in to EarthLocation even if they include angles outside of the range of -180 to 180 degrees. [#9900]

• `SkyCoord.radial_velocity_correction` no longer raises an Exception when space motion information is present on the SkyCoord. [#9980]

astropy.io

• Fixed a bug that prevented the unified I/O infrastructure from working with datasets that are represented by directories rather than files. [#9866]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a bug in the fast_reader C parsers incorrectly returning entries of isolated positive/negative signs as float instead of str. [#9918]

• Fixed a segmentation fault in the fast_reader C parsers when parsing an invalid file with guess=True and the file contains inconsistent column numbers in combination with a quoted field; e.g., "1  2\n 3  4 '5'". [#9923]

• Magnitude, decibel, and dex can now be stored in ecsv files. [#9933]

astropy.io.misc

• Magnitude, decibel, and dex can now be stored in hdf5 files. [#9933]

• Fixed serialization of polynomial models to include non default values of domain and window values. [#9956, #9961]

• Fixed a bug which affected overwriting tables within hdf5 files. Overwriting an existing path with associated column meta data now also overwrites the meta data associated with the table. [#9950]

• Fixed serialization of Time objects with location under time-1.0.0 ASDF schema. [#9983]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix regression with GroupsHDU which needs to modify the header to handle invalid headers, and fix accessing .data for empty HDU. [#9711, #9934]

• Fix fitsdiff when its arguments are directories that contain other directories. [#9711]

• Fix writing noncontiguous data to a compressed HDU. [#9958]

• Added verification of disp (TDISP) keyword to fits.Column and extended tests for TFORM and TDISP validation. [#9978]

• Fix checksum verification to process all HDUs instead of only the first one because of the lazy loading feature. [#10012]

• Allow passing output_verify to .close when using the context manager. [#10030]

• Prevent instantiation of PrimaryHDU and ImageHDU with a scalar. [#10041]

• Fix column access by attribute with FITS_rec: columns with scaling or columns from ASCII tables where not properly converted when accessed by attribute name. [#10069]

astropy.io.misc

• Magnitude, decibel, and dex can now be stored in hdf5 files. [#9933]

• Fixed serialization of polynomial models to include non default values of domain and window values. [#9956, #9961]

• Fixed a bug which affected overwriting tables within hdf5 files. Overwriting an existing path with associated column meta data now also overwrites the meta data associated with the table. [#9950]

• Fixed serialization of Time objects with location under time-1.0.0 ASDF schema. [#9983]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a bug in setting default values of parameters of orthonormal polynomials when constructing a model set. [#9987]

astropy.table

• Fixed bug in Table.reverse for tables that contain non-mutable mixin columns (like SkyCoord) for which in-place item update is not allowed. [#9839]

• Tables containing Magnitude, decibel, and dex columns can now be saved to ecsv files. [#9933]

• Fixed bug where adding or inserting a row fails on a table with an index defined on a column that is not the first one. [#10027]

• Ensured that table.show_in_browser also worked for mixin columns like Time and SkyCoord. [#10068]

astropy.time

• Fix inaccuracy when converting between TimeDelta and datetime.timedelta. [#9679]

• Fixed exception when changing format in the case when out_subfmt is defined and is incompatible with the new format. [#9812]

• Fixed exceptions in Time.to_value(): when supplying any subfmt argument for string-based formats like ‘iso’, and for subfmt='long' for the formats ‘byear’, ‘jyear’, and ‘decimalyear’. [#9812]

• Fixed bug where the location attribute was lost when creating a new Time object from an existing Time or list of Time objects. [#9969]

• Fixed a bug where an exception occurred when creating a Time object if the val1 argument was a regular double and the val2 argument was a longdouble. [#10034]

astropy.timeseries

• Fixed issue with reference time for the transit_time parameter returned by the BoxLeastSquares periodogram. Now, the transit_time will be within the range of the input data and arbitrary time offsets/zero points no longer affect results. [#10013]

astropy.units

• Fix for quantity_input annotation raising an exception on iterable types that don’t define a general __contains__ for checking if None is contained (e.g. Enum as of python3.8), by instead checking for instance of Sequence. [#9948]

• Fix for u.Quantity not taking into account ndmin if constructed from another u.Quantity instance with different but convertible unit [#10066]

astropy.utils

• Fixed deprecated_renamed_argument not passing in user value to deprecated keyword when the keyword has no new name. [#9981]

• Fixed deprecated_renamed_argument not issuing a deprecation warning when deprecated keyword without new name is passed in as positional argument. [#9985]

• Fixed detection of read-only filesystems in the caching code. [#10007]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed bug from matplotlib >=3.1 where an empty Quantity array is sent for unit conversion as an empty list. [#9848]

• Fix bug in ZScaleInterval to return the array minimum and maximum when there are less then min_npixels in the input array. [#9913]

• Fix a bug in simplifying axis labels that affected non-rectangular frames. [#8004, #9991]

Other Changes and Additions

• Increase minimum asdf version to 2.5.2. [#9996, #9819]

• Updated bundled version of WCSLIB to v7.2. [#10021]

Version 4.0 (2019-12-16)

New Features

astropy.config

• The config and cache directories and the name of the config file are now customizable. This allows affiliated packages to put their configuration files in locations other than CONFIG_DIR/.astropy/. [#8237]

astropy.constants

• The version of constants can be specified via ScienceState in a way that constants and units will be consistent. [#8517]

• Default constants now use CODATA 2018 and IAU 2015 definitions. [#8761]

• Constants can be pickled and unpickled. [#9377]

astropy.convolution

• Fixed a bug [#9168] where having a kernel defined using unitless astropy quantity objects would result in a crash [#9300]

astropy.coordinates

• Changed coordinates.solar_system_ephemeris to also accept local files as input. The ephemeris can now be selected by either keyword (e.g. ‘jpl’, ‘de430’), URL or file path. [#8767]

• Added a cylindrical property to SkyCoord for shorthand access to a CylindricalRepresentation of the coordinate, as is already available for other common representations. [#8857]

• The default parameters for the Galactocentric frame are now controlled by a ScienceState subclass, galactocentric_frame_defaults. New parameter sets will be added to this object periodically to keep up with ever-improved measurements of the solar position and motion. [#9346]

• Coordinate frame classes can now have multiple aliases by assigning a list of aliases to the class variable name. Any of the aliases can be used for attribute-style access or as the target of tranform_to() calls. [#8834]

• Passing a NaN to Distance no longer raises a warning. [#9598]

astropy.cosmology

• The pre-publication Planck 2018 cosmological parameters are included as the Planck2018_arXiv_v2 object. Please note that the values are preliminary, and when the paper is accepted a final version will be included as Planck18. [#8111]

astropy.io.ascii

• Removed incorrect warnings on Overflow when reading in FloatType 0.0 with use_fast_converter; synchronised IntType Overflow warning messages. [#9082]

astropy.io.misc

• Eliminate deprecated compatibility mode when writing Table metadata to HDF5 format. [#8899]

• Add support for orthogonal polynomial models to ASDF. [#9107]

astropy.io.fits

• Changed the fitscheck and fitsdiff script to use the argparse module instead of optparse. [#9148]

• Allow writing of Table objects with Time columns that are also table indices to FITS files. [#8077]

astropy.io.votable

• Support VOTable version 1.4. The main addition is the new element, TIMESYS, which allows defining of metadata for temporal coordinates much like COOSYS defines metadata for celestial coordinates. [#9475]

astropy.logger

• Added a configuration option to specify the text encoding of the log file, with the default behavior being the platform-preferred encoding. [#9203]

astropy.modeling

• Major rework of modeling internals. See modeling documentation for details. . [#8769]

• Add Tabular1D.inverse. [#9083]

• Model.rename was changed to add the ability to rename Model.inputs and Model.outputs. [#9220]

• New function fix_inputs to generate new models from others by fixing specific inputs variable values to constants. [#9135]

• inputs and outputs are now model instance attributes, and n_inputs and n_outputs are class attributes. Backwards compatible default values of inputs and outputs are generated. Model.inputs and Model.outputs are now settable which allows renaming them on per user case. [#9298]

• Add a new model representing a sequence of rotations in 3D around an arbitrary number of axes. [#9369]

• Add many of the numpy ufunc functions as models. [#9401]

• Add BlackBody model. [#9282]

• Add Drude1D model. [#9452]

• Added analytical King model (KingProjectedAnalytic1D). [#9084]

• Added Exponential1D and Logarithmic1D models. [#9351]

astropy.nddata

• Add a way for technically invalid but unambiguous units in a fits header to be parsed by CCDData. [#9397]

• NDData now only accepts WCS objects which implement either the high, or low level APE 14 WCS API. All WCS objects are converted to a high level WCS object, so NDData.wcs now always returns a high level APE 14 object. Not all array slices are valid for wcs objects, so some slicing operations which used to work may now fail. [#9067]

astropy.stats

• The biweight_location, biweight_scale, and biweight_midvariance functions now allow for the axis keyword to be a tuple of integers. [#9309]

• Added an ignore_nan option to the biweight_location, biweight_scale, and biweight_midvariance functions. [#9457]

• A numpy MaskedArray can now be input to the biweight_location, biweight_scale, and biweight_midvariance functions. [#9466]

• Removed the warning related to p0 in the Bayesian blocks algorithm. The caveat related to p0 is described in the docstring for Events. [#9567]

astropy.table

• Improved the implementation of Table.replace_column() to provide a speed-up of 5 to 10 times for wide tables. The method can now accept any input which convertible to a column of the correct length, not just Column subclasses. [#8902]

• Improved the implementation of Table.add_column() to provide a speed-up of 2 to 10 (or more) when adding a column to tables, with increasing benefit as the number of columns increases. The method can now accept any input which is convertible to a column of the correct length, not just Column subclasses. [#8933]

• Changed the implementation of Table.add_columns() to use the new Table.add_column() method. In most cases the performance is similar or slightly faster to the previous implementation. [#8933]

• MaskedColumn.data will now return a plain MaskedArray rather than the previous (unintended) masked_BaseColumn. [#8855]

• Added depth-wise stacking dstack() in higher level table operation. It help will in stacking table column depth-wise. [#8939]

• Added a new table equality method values_equal() which allows comparison table values to another table, list, or value, and returns an element-by-element equality table. [#9068]

• Added new join_type='cartesian' option to the join operation. [#9288]

• Allow adding a table column as a list of mixin-type objects, for instance t['q'] = [1 * u.m, 2 * u.m]. [#9165]

• Allow table join() using any sortable key column (e.g. Time), not just ndarray subclasses. A column is considered sortable if there is a <column>.info.get_sortable_arrays() method that is implemented. [#9340]

• Added Table.iterrows() for making row-wise iteration faster. [#8969]

• Allow table to be initialized with a list of dict where the dict keys are not the same in every row. The table column names are the set of all keys found in the input data, and any missing key/value pairs are turned into missing data in the table. [#9425]

• Prevent unnecessary ERFA warnings when indexing by Time columns. [#9545]

• Added support for sorting tables which contain non-mutable mixin columns (like SkyCoord) for which in-place item update is not allowed. [#9549]

• Ensured that inserting np.ma.masked (or any other value with a mask) into a MaskedColumn causes a masked entry to be inserted. [#9623]

• Fixed a bug that caused an exception when initializing a MaskedColumn from another MaskedColumn that has a structured dtype. [#9651]

astropy.tests

• The plugin that handles the custom header in the test output has been moved to the pytest-astropy-header plugin package. See the README at for information about using this new plugin. [#9214]

astropy.time

• Added a new time format ymdhms for representing times via year, month, day, hour, minute, and second attributes. [#7644]

• TimeDelta gained a to_value method, so that it becomes easier to use it wherever a Quantity with units of time could be used. [#8762]

• Made scalar Time and TimeDelta objects hashable based on JD, time scale, and location attributes. [#8912]

• Improved error message when bad input is used to initialize a Time or TimeDelta object and the format is specified. [#9296]

• Allow numeric time formats to be initialized with numpy longdouble, Decimal instances, and strings. One can select just one of these using in_subfmt. The output can be similarly set using out_subfmt. [#9361]

• Introduce a new .to_value() method for Time (and adjusted the existing method for TimeDelta) so that one can get values in a given format and possible subfmt (e.g., to_value('mjd', 'str'). [#9361]

• Prevent unnecessary ERFA warnings when sorting Time objects. [#9545]

astropy.timeseries

• Adding epoch_phase, wrap_phase and normalize_phase keywords to TimeSeries.fold() to control the phase of the epoch and to return normalized phase rather than time for the folded TimeSeries. [#9455]

astropy.uncertainty

• Distribution was rewritten such that it deals better with subclasses. As a result, Quantity distributions now behave correctly with to methods yielding new distributions of the kind expected for the starting distribution, and to_value yielding NdarrayDistribution instances. [#9429, #9442]

• The pdf_* properties that were used to calculate statistical properties of Distrubution instances were changed into methods. This allows one to pass parameters such as ddof to pdf_std and pdf_var (which generally should equal 1 instead of the default 0), and reflects that these are fairly involved calculations, not just “properties”. [#9613]

astropy.units

• Support for unicode parsing. Currently supported are superscripts, Ohm, Ångström, and the micro-sign. [#9348]

• Accept non-unit type annotations in @quantity_input. [#8984]

• For numpy 1.17 and later, the new __array_function__ protocol is used to ensure that all top-level numpy functions interact properly with Quantity, preserving units also in operations like np.concatenate. [#8808]

• Add equivalencies for surface brightness units to spectral_density. [#9282]

astropy.utils

• astropy.utils.data.download_file and astropy.utils.data.get_readable_fileobj now provides an http_headers keyword to pass in specific request headers for the download. It also now defaults to providing User-Agent: Astropy and Accept: */* headers. The default User-Agent value can be set with a new astropy.data.conf.default_http_user_agent configuration item. [#9508, #9564]

• Added a new astropy.utils.misc.unbroadcast function which can be used to return the smallest array that can be broadcasted back to the initial array. [#9209]

• The specific IERS Earth rotation parameter table used for time and coordinate transformations can now be set, either in a context or per session, using astropy.utils.iers.earth_rotation_table. [#9244]

• Added export_cache and import_cache to permit transporting downloaded data to machines with no Internet connection. Several new functions are available to investigate the cache contents; e.g., check_download_cache can be used to confirm that the persistent cache has not become damaged. [#9182]

• A new astropy.utils.iers.LeapSeconds class has been added to track leap seconds. [#9365]

astropy.visualization

• Added a new time_support context manager/function for making it easy to plot and format Time objects in Matplotlib. [#8782]

• Added support for plotting any WCS compliant with the generalized (APE 14) WCS API with WCSAxes. [#8885, #9098]

• Improved display of information when inspecting WCSAxes.coords. [#9098]

• Improved error checking for the slices= argument to WCSAxes. [#9098]

• Added support for more solar frames in WCSAxes. [#9275]

• Add support for one dimensional plots to WCSAxes. [#9266]

• Add a get_format_unit to wcsaxes.CoordinateHelper. [#9392]

• WCSAxes now, by default, sets a default label for plot axes which is the WCS physical type (and unit) for that axis. This can be disabled using the coords[i].set_auto_axislabel(False) or by explicitly setting an axis label. [#9392]

• Fixed the display of tick labels when plotting all sky images that have a coord_wrap less than 360. [#9542]

astropy.wcs

• Added a astropy.wcs.wcsapi.pixel_to_pixel function that can be used to transform pixel coordinates in one dataset with a WCS to pixel coordinates in another dataset with a different WCS. This function is designed to be efficient when the input arrays are broadcasted views of smaller arrays. [#9209]

• Added a local_partial_pixel_derivatives function that can be used to determine a matrix of partial derivatives of each world coordinate with respect to each pixel coordinate. [#9392]

• Updated wcslib to v6.4. [#9125]

• Improved the SlicedLowLevelWCS class in astropy.wcs.wcsapi to avoid storing chains of nested SlicedLowLevelWCS objects when applying multiple slicing operations in turn. [#9210]

• Added a wcs_info_str function to astropy.wcs.wcsapi to show a summary of an APE-14-compliant WCS as a string. [#8546, #9207]

• Added two new optional attributes to the APE 14 low-level WCS: pixel_axis_names and world_axis_names. [#9156]

• Updated the WCS class to now correctly take and return Time objects in the high-level APE 14 API (e.g. pixel_to_world. [#9376]

• SlicedLowLevelWCS now raises IndexError rather than ValueError on an invalid slice. [#9067]

• Added fit_wcs_from_points function to astropy.wcs.utils. Fits a WCS object to set of matched detector/sky coordinates. [#9469]

• Fix various bugs in SlicedLowLevelWCS when the WCS being sliced was one dimensional. [#9693]

API Changes

astropy.constants

• Deprecated set_enabled_constants context manager. Use astropy.physical_constants and astropy.astronomical_constants. [#9025]

astropy.convolution

• Removed the deprecated keyword argument interpolate_nan from convolve_fft. [#9356]

• Removed the deprecated keyword argument stddev from Gaussian2DKernel. [#9356]

• Deprecated and renamed MexicanHat1DKernel and MexicanHat2DKernel to RickerWavelet1DKernel and RickerWavelet2DKernel. [#9445]

astropy.coordinates

• Removed the recommended_units attribute from Representations; it was deprecated since 3.0. [#8892]

• Removed the deprecated frame attribute classes, FrameAttribute, TimeFrameAttribute, QuantityFrameAttribute, CartesianRepresentationFrameAttribute; deprecated since 3.0. [#9326]

• Removed longitude and latitude attributes from EarthLocation; deprecated since 2.0. [#9326]

• The DifferentialAttribute for frame classes now passes through any input to the allowed_classes if only one allowed class is specified, i.e. this now allows passing a quantity in for frame attributes that use DifferentialAttribute. [#9325]

• Removed the deprecated galcen_ra and galcen_dec attributes from the Galactocentric frame. [#9346]

astropy.extern

• Remove the bundled six module. [#8315]

astropy.io.ascii

• Masked column handling has changed, see astropy.table entry below. [#8789]

astropy.io.misc

• Masked column handling has changed, see astropy.table entry below. [#8789]

• Removed deprecated usecPickle kwarg from fnunpickle and fnpickle. [#8890]

astropy.io.fits

• Masked column handling has changed, see astropy.table entry below. [#8789]

• io.fits.Header has been made safe for subclasses for copying and slicing. As a result of this change, the private subclass CompImageHeader now always should be passed an explicit image_header. [#9229]

• Removed the deprecated tolerance option in fitsdiff and io.fits.diff classes. [#9520]

• Removed deprecated keyword arguments for CompImageHDU: compressionType, tileSize, hcompScale, hcompSmooth, quantizeLevel. [#9520]

astropy.io.votable

• Changed pedantic argument to verify and change it to have three string-based options (ignore, warn, and exception) instead of just being a boolean. In addition, changed default to ignore, which means that warnings will not be shown by default when loading VO tables. [#8715]

astropy.modeling

• Eliminates support for compound classes (but not compound instances!) [#8769]

• Slicing compound models more restrictive. [#8769]

• Shape of parameters now includes n_models as dimension. [#8769]

• Parameter instances now hold values instead of models. [#8769]

• Compound model parameters now share instance and value with constituent models. [#8769]

• No longer possible to assign slices of parameter values to model parameters attribute (it is possible to replace it with a complete array). [#8769]

• Many private attributes and methods have changed (see documentation). [#8769]

• Deprecated BlackBody1D model and blackbody_nu and blackbody_lambda functions. [#9282]

• The deprecated rotations.rotation_matrix_from_angle was removed. [#9363]

• Deprecated and renamed MexicanHat1D and MexicanHat2D to RickerWavelet1D and RickerWavelet2D. [#9445]

• Deprecated modeling.utils.ExpressionTree. [#9576]

astropy.stats

• Removed the iters keyword from sigma clipping stats functions. [#8948]

• Renamed the a parameter to data in biweight stat functions. [#8948]

• Renamed the a parameter to data in median_absolute_deviation. [#9011]

• Renamed the conflevel keyword to confidence_level in poisson_conf_interval. Usage of conflevel now issues AstropyDeprecationWarning. [#9408]

• Renamed the conf keyword to confidence_level in binom_conf_interval and binned_binom_proportion. Usage of conf now issues AstropyDeprecationWarning. [#9408]

• Renamed the conf_lvl keyword to confidence_level in jackknife_stats. Usage of conf_lvl now issues AstropyDeprecationWarning. [#9408]

astropy.table

• The handling of masked columns in the Table class has changed in a way that may impact program behavior. Now a Table with masked=False may contain both Column and MaskedColumn objects, and adding a masked column or row to a table no longer “upgrades” the table and columns to masked. This means that tables with masked data which are read via Table.read() will now always have masked=False, though specific columns will be masked as needed. Two new table properties has_masked_columns and has_masked_values were added. See the Masking change in astropy 4.0 section within for details. [#8789]

• Table operation functions such as join, vstack, hstack, etc now always return a table with masked=False, though the individual columns may be masked as necessary. [#8957]

• Changed implementation of Table.add_column() and Table.add_columns() methods. Now it is possible add any object(s) which can be converted or broadcasted to a valid column for the table. Table.__setitem__ now just calls add_column. [#8933]

• Changed default table configuration setting replace_warnings from ['slice'] to []. This removes the default warning when replacing a table column that is a slice of another column. [#9144]

• Removed the non-public method astropy.table.np_utils.recarray_fromrecords. [#9165]

astropy.tests

• In addition to DeprecationWarning, now FutureWarning and ImportWarning would also be turned into exceptions. [#8506]

• warnings_to_ignore_by_pyver option in enable_deprecations_as_exceptions() has changed. Please refer to API documentation. [#8506]

• Default settings for warnings_to_ignore_by_pyver are updated to remove very old warnings that are no longer relevant and to add a new warning caused by pytest-doctestplus. [#8506]

astropy.time

• Time.get_ut1_utc now uses the auto-updated IERS_Auto by default, instead of the bundled IERS_B file. [#9226]

• Time formats that do not use val2 now raise ValueError instead of silently ignoring a provided value. [#9373]

• Custom time formats can now accept floating-point types with extended precision. Existing time formats raise exceptions rather than discarding extended precision through conversion to ordinary floating-point. [#9368]

• Time formats (implemented in subclasses of TimeFormat) now have their input and output routines more thoroughly validated, making it more difficult to create damaged Time objects. [#9375]

• The TimeDelta.to_value() method now can also take the format name as its argument, in which case the value will be calculated using the TimeFormat machinery. For this case, one can also pass a subfmt argument to retrieve the value in another form than float. [#9361]

astropy.timeseries

• Keyword midpoint_epoch is renamed to epoch_time. [#9455]

astropy.uncertainty

• Distribution was rewritten such that it deals better with subclasses. As a result, Quantity distributions now behave correctly with to methods yielding new distributions of the kind expected for the starting distribution, and to_value yielding NdarrayDistribution instances. [#9442]

astropy.units

• For consistency with ndarray, scalar Quantity.value will now return a numpy scalar rather than a python one. This should help keep track of precision better, but may lead to unexpected results for the rare cases where numpy scalars behave differently than python ones (e.g., taking the square root of a negative number). [#8876]

• Removed the magnitude_zero_points module, which was deprecated in favour of astropy.units.photometric since 3.1. [#9353]

• EquivalentUnitsList now has a _repr_html_ method to output a HTML table on a call to find_equivalent_units in Jupyter notebooks. [#9495]

astropy.utils

• download_file and related functions now accept a list of fallback sources, and they are able to update the cache at the user’s request. [#9182]

• Allow astropy.utils.console.ProgressBarOrSpinner.map and .map_unordered to take an argument multiprocessing_start_method to control how subprocesses are started; the different methods (fork, spawn, and forkserver) have different implications in terms of security, efficiency, and behavioural anomalies. The option is useful in particular for cross-platform testing because Windows supports only spawn while Linux defaults to fork. [#9182]

• All operations that act on the astropy download cache now take an argument pkgname that allows one to specify which package’s cache to use. [#8237, #9182]

• Removed deprecated funcsigs and futures from astropy.utils.compat. [#8909]

• Removed the deprecated astropy.utils.compat.numpy module. [#8910]

• Deprecated InheritDocstrings as it is natively supported by Sphinx 1.7 or higher. [#8881]

• Deprecated astropy.utils.timer module, which has been moved to astroquery.utils.timer and will be part of astroquery 0.4.0. [#9038]

• Deprecated astropy.utils.misc.set_locale function, as it is meant for internal use only. [#9471]

• The implementation of data_info.DataInfo has changed (for a considerable performance boost). Generally, this should not affect simple subclasses, but because the class now uses __slots__ any attributes on the class have to be explicitly given a slot. [#8998]

• IERS tables now use nan to mark missing values (rather than 1e20). [#9226]

astropy.visualization

• The default clip value is now False in ImageNormalize. [#9478]

• The default clip value is now False in simple_norm. [#9698]

• Infinite values are now excluded when calculating limits in ManualInterval and MinMaxInterval. They were already excluded in all other interval classes. [#9480]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed nan_treatment='interpolate' option to convolve_fft to properly take into account fill_value. [#8122]

astropy.coordinates

• The QuantityAttribute class now supports a None default value if a unit is specified. [#9345]

• When Representation classes with the same name are defined, this no longer leads to a ValueError, but instead to a warning and the removal of both from the name registry (i.e., one either has to use the class itself to set, e.g., representation_type, or refer to the class by its fully qualified name). [#8561]

astropy.io.fits

• Implemented skip (after warning) of header cards with reserved keywords in table_to_hdu. [#9390]

• Add AstropyDeprecationWarning to read_table_fits when hdu= is selected, but does not match single present table HDU. [#9512]

astropy.io.votable

• Address issue #8995 by ignoring BINARY2 null mask bits for string values on parsing a VOTable. In this way, the reader should never create masked values for string types. [#9057]

• Corrected a spurious warning issued for the value attribute of the <OPTION> element in VOTable, as well as a test that erroneously treated the warning as acceptable. [#9470]

astropy.nddata

• Cutout2D will now get the WCS from its first argument if that argument has with WCS property. [#9492]

• overlap_slices will now raise a ValueError if the input position contains any non-finite values (e.g. NaN or inf). [#9648]

astropy.stats

• Fixed a bug where bayesian_blocks returned a single edge. [#8560]

• Fixed input data type validation for bayesian_blocks to work int arrays. [#9513]

astropy.table

• Fix bug where adding a column consisting of a list of masked arrays was dropping the masks. [#9048]

• Quantity columns with custom units can now round-trip via FITS tables, as long as the custom unit is enabled during reading (otherwise, the unit will become an UnrecognizedUnit). [#9015]

• Fix bug where string values could be truncated when inserting into a Column or MaskedColumn, or when adding or inserting a row containing string values. [#9559]

astropy.time

• Fix bug when Time object is created with only masked elements. [#9624]

• Fix inaccuracy when converting between TimeDelta and datetime.timedelta. [#9679]

astropy.units

• Ensure that output from test functions of and comparisons between quantities can be stored into pre-allocated output arrays (using out=array) [#9273]

astropy.utils

• For the default IERS_Auto table, which combines IERS A and B values, the IERS nutation parameters “dX_2000A” and “dY_2000A” are now also taken from the actual IERS B file rather than from the B values stored in the IERS A file. Any differences should be negligible for any practical application, but this may help exactly reproducing results. [#9237]

astropy.visualization

• Calling WCSAxes.set_axis_off() now correctly turns off drawing the Axes. [#9411]

• Fix incorrect transformation behavior in WCSAxes.plot_coord and correctly handle when input coordinates are not already in spherical representations. [#8927]

• Fixed ImageNormalize so that when it is initialized without data it will still use the input interval class. [#9698]

• Fixed ImageNormalize to handle input data with non-finite values. [#9698]

astropy.wcs

• Fix incorrect value returned by wcsapi.HighLevelWCSWrapper.axis_correlation_matrix. [#9554]

• Fix NaN-masking of world coordinates when some but not all of the coordinates were flagged as invalid by WCSLIB. This occurred for example with WCS with >2 dimensions where two of the dimensions were celestial coordinates and pixel coordinates outside of the ‘sky’ were converted to world coordinates - previously all world coordinates were masked even if uncorrelated with the celestial axes, but this is no longer the case. [#9688]

• The default WCS to celestial frame mapping for world coordinate systems that specify TLON and TLAT coordinates will now return an ITRS frame with the representation class set to SphericalRepresentation. This fixes a bug that caused WCS.pixel_to_world to raise an error for such world coordinate systems. [#9609]

• FITSWCSAPIMixin now returns tuples not lists from pixel_to_world and world_to_pixel. [#9678]

Other Changes and Additions

• Versions of Python <3.6 are no longer supported. [#8955]

• Matplotlib 2.1 and later is now required. [#8787]

• Versions of Numpy <1.16 are no longer supported. [#9292]

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.470. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#9233]

• The bundled ERFA was updated to version 1.7.0. This is based on SOFA 20190722. This includes a fix to avoid precision loss for negative JDs, and also includes additional routines to allow updates to the leap-second table. [#9323, #9734]

• The default server for the IERS data files has been updated to reflect long-term downtime of the canonical USNO server. [#9487, #9508]

Version 3.2.3 (2019-10-27)

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated IERS A URLs due to USNO prolonged maintenance. [#9443]

Version 3.2.2 (2019-10-07)

Bug fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed a bug in discretize_oversample_1D/2D() from astropy.convolution.utils, which might occasionally introduce unexpected oversampling grid dimensions due to a numerical precision issue. [#9293]

• Fixed a bug [#9168] where having a kernel defined using unitless astropy quantity objects would result in a crash [#9300]

astropy.coordinates

• Fix concatenation of representations for cases where the units were different. [#8877]

• Check for NaN values in catalog and match coordinates before building and querying the KDTree for coordinate matching. [#9007]

• Fix sky coordinate matching when a dimensionless distance is provided. [#9008]

• Raise a faster and more meaningful error message when differential data units are not compatible with a containing representation’s units. [#9064]

• Changed the timescale in ICRS to CIRS from ‘tdb’ to ‘tt’ conversion and vice-versa, as the erfa function that gets called in the process, pnm06a accepts time in TT. [#9079]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed the fast reader when used in parallel and with the multiprocessing ‘spawn’ method (which is the default on MacOS X with Python 3.8 and later), and enable parallel fast reader on Windows. [#8853]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixes bug where an invalid TRPOS<n> keyword was being generated for FITS time column when no location was available. [#8784]

• Fixed a wrong exception when converting a Table with a unit that is not FITS compliant and not convertible to a string using format='fits'. [#8906]

• Fixed an issue with A3DTABLE extension that could not be read. [#9012]

• Fixed the update of the header when creating GroupsHDU from data. [#9216]

astropy.nddata

• Fix to add_array, which now accepts array_small having dimensions equal to array_large, instead of only allowing smaller sizes of arrays. [#9118]

astropy.stats

• Fixed median_absolute_deviation for the case where ignore_nan=True and an input masked array contained both NaNs and infs. [#9307]

astropy.table

• Comparisons between Column instances and Quantity will now correctly take into account the unit (as was already the case for regular operations such as addition). [#8904]

astropy.time

• Allow Time to be initialized with an empty value for all formats. [#8854]

• Fixed a troubling bug in which Time could loose precision, with deviations of 300 ns. [#9328]

astropy.timeseries

• Fixed handling of Quantity input data for all methods of LombScarge.false_alarm_probabilty. [#9246]

astropy.units

• Allow conversion of Column with logarithmic units to a suitable Quantity subclass if subok=True. [#9188]

• Ensured that we simplify powers to smaller denominators if that is consistent within rounding precision. [#9267]

• Ensured that the powers shown in a unit’s repr are always correct, not oversimplified. [#9267]

astropy.utils

• Fixed find_api_page access by using custom request headers and HTTPS when version is specified. [#9032]

• Make download_file (and by extension get_readable_fileobj and others) check the size of downloaded files against the size claimed by the server. [#9302]

• Fix find_current_module so that it works properly if astropy is being used inside a bundle such as that produced by PyInstaller. [#8845]

• Fix path to renamed classes, which previously included duplicate path/module information under certain circumstances. [#8845]

astropy.visualization

• Silence numpy runtime warnings in WCSAxes when drawing grids. [#8882]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed equality test between cunit where the first element was equal but the following elements differed. [#9154]

• Fixed a crash while loading a WCS from headers containing duplicate SIP keywords. [#8893]

• Fixed a possible buffer overflow when using too large negative indices for cunit or ctype [#9151]

• Fixed reference counting in WCSBase.__init__ [#9166]

• Fix SlicedLowLevelWCS world_to_pixel_values and pixel_to_world_values when inputs need broadcasting to the same shape. (i.e. when one input is sliced out) [#9250]

• Fixed a bug that caused WCS.array_shape, WCS.pixel_shape and WCS.pixel_bounds to be incorrect after using WCS.sub. [#9095]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed a bug that caused files outside of the astropy module directory to be included as package data, resulting in some cases in errors when doing repeated builds. [#9039]

Version 3.2.1 (2019-06-14)

Bug fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Avoid reporting a warning with BinTableHDU.from_columns with keywords that are not provided by the user. [#8838]

• Fix Header.fromfile to work on FITS files. [#8713]

• Fix reading of empty BinTableHDU when stored in a gzip-compressed file. [#8848]

astropy.table

• Fix a problem where mask was dropped when creating a MaskedColumn from a list of MaskedArray objects. [#8826]

astropy.wcs

• Added None to be displayed as a world_axis_physical_types in the WCS repr, as None values are now supported in APE14. [#8811]

Version 3.2 (2019-06-10)

New Features

astropy.constants

• Add CODATA 2018 constants but not make them default because the redefinition of SI units that will follow has not been implemented yet. [#8595]

astropy.coordinates

• New BarycentricMeanEcliptic, HeliocentricTrueEcliptic and GeocentricTrueEcliptic frames. The ecliptic frames are no longer considered experimental. [#8394]

• The default time scale for epochs like ‘J2000’ or ‘B1975’ is now “tt”, which is the correct one for ‘J2000’ and avoids leap-second warnings for epochs in the far future or past. [#8600]

astropy.extern

• Bundled six now emits AstropyDeprecationWarning. It will be removed in 4.0. [#8323]

astropy.io.ascii

• IPAC tables now output data types of float instead of double, or int instead of long, based on the column dtype.itemsize. [#8216]

• Update handling of MaskedColumn columns when using the ‘data_mask’ serialization method. This can make writing ECSV significantly faster if the data do not actually have any masked values. [#8447]

• Fixed a bug that caused newlines to be incorrect when writing out ASCII tables on Windows (they were \r\r\n instead of \r\n). [#8659]

astropy.io.misc

• Implement serialization of TimeDelta in ASDF. [#8285]

• Implement serialization of EarthLocation in ASDF. [#8286]

• Implement serialization of SkyCoord in ASDF. [#8284]

• Support serialization of Astropy tables with mixin columns in ASDF. [#8337]

• No warnings when reading HDF5 files with only one table and no path= argument [#8483]

• The HDF5 writer will now create a default table instead of raising an exception when path= is not specified and when writing to empty/new HDF5 files. [#8553]

astropy.io.fits

• Optimize parsing of cards within the Header class. [#8428]

• Optimize the parsing of headers to get the structural keywords that are needed to find extensions. Thanks to this, getting a random HDU from a file with many extensions is much faster than before, in particular when the extension headers contain many keywords. [#8502]

• Change behavior of FITS undefined value in Header such that None is used in Python to represent FITS undefined when using dict interface. Undefined can also be assigned and is translated to None. Previously setting a header card value to None resulted in an empty string field rather than a FITS undefined value. [#8572]

• Allow Header.fromstring and Card.fromstring to accept bytes. [#8707]

astropy.io.registry

• Implement Table reader and writer for ASDF. [#8261]

• Implement Table reader and writer methods to wrap pandas I/O methods for CSV, Fixed width format, HTML, and JSON. [#8381]

• Add help() and list_formats() methods to unified I/O read and write methods. For example Table.read.help() gives help on available Table read formats and Table.read.help('fits') gives detailed help on the arguments for reading FITS table file. [#8255]

astropy.table

• Initializing a table with Table(rows=...), if the first item is an OrderedDict, now uses the column order of the first row. [#8587]

• Added new pprint_all() and pformat_all() methods to Table. These two new methods print the entire table by default. [#8577]

• Removed restriction of initializing a Table from a dict with copy=False. [#8541]

• Improved speed of table row access by a factor of about 2-3. Improved speed of Table len() by a factor of around 3-10 (depending on the number of columns). [#8494]

• Improved the Table - pandas DataFrame interface (to_pandas() and from_pandas()). Mixin columns like Time and Quantity can now be converted to pandas by flattening the columns as necessary to plain columns. Time and TimeDelta columns get converted to corresponding pandas date or time delta types. The DataFrame index is now handled in the conversion methods. [#8247]

• Added rename_columns method to rename multiple columns in one call. [#5159, #8070]

• Improved Table performance by reducing unnecessary calls to copy and deepcopy, especially as related to the table and column meta attributes. Changed the behavior when slicing a table (either in rows or with a list of column names) so now the sliced output gets a light (key-only) copy of meta instead of a deepcopy. Changed the Table.meta class-level descriptor so that assigning directly to meta, e.g. tbl.meta = new_meta no longer does a deepcopy and instead just directly assigns the new_meta object reference. Changed Table initialization so that input meta is copied only if copy=True. [#8404]

• Improved Table slicing performance with internal implementation changes related to column attribute access and certain input validation. [#8493]

• Added reverse argument to the sort and argsort methods to allow sorting in reverse order. [#8528]

• Improved Table.sort() performance by removing self[keys] from code which is creating deep copies of meta attribute and adding a new keyword names in get_index() to get index by using a list or tuple containing names of columns. [#8570]

• Expose represent_mixins_as_columns as a public function in the astropy.table subpackage. This previously-private function in the table.serialize module is used to represent mixin columns in a Table as one or more plain Column objects. [#7729]

astropy.timeseries

• Added a new astropy.timeseries sub-package to represent and manipulate sampled and binned time series. [#8540]

• The BoxLeastSquares and LombScargle classes have been moved to astropy.timeseries.periodograms from astropy.stats. [#8591]

• Added the ability to provide absolute Time objects to the BoxLeastSquares and LombScargle periodogram classes. [#8599]

• Added model inspection methods (model_parameters(), design_matrix(), and offset()) to astropy.timeseries.LombScargle class [#8397].

astropy.units

• Quantity overrides of ndarray methods such as sum, min, max, which are implemented via reductions, have been removed since they are dealt with in Quantity.__array_ufunc__. This should not affect subclasses, but they may consider doing similarly. [#8316] Note that this does not include methods that use more complicated python code such as mean, std and var. [#8370]

astropy.visualization

• Added CompositeStretch, which inherits from CompositeTransform and also BaseStretch so that it can be used with ImageNormalize. [#8564]

• Added a log_a argument to the simple_norm method. Similar to the exposing of the asinh_a argument for AsinhStretch, the new log_a argument is now exposed for LogStretch. [#8436]

astropy.wcs

• WCSLIB was updated to v 6.2. This adds support for time-related WCS keywords (WCS Paper VII). FITS headers containing Time axis are parsed and the axis is included in the WCS object. [#8592]

• The OBSGEO attribute as expanded to 6 members - XYZLBH. [#8592]

• Added a new class SlicedLowLevelWCS in astropy.wcs.wcsapi that can be used to slice any WCS that conforms to the BaseLowLevelWCS API. [#8546]

• Updated implementation of WCS.__getitem__ and WCS.slice to now return a SlicedLowLevelWCS rather than raising an error when reducing the dimensionality of the WCS. [#8546]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• QuantityAttribute no longer has a default value for default. The previous value of None was misleading as it always was an error. [#8450]

• The default J2000 has been changed to use be January 1, 2000 12:00 TT instead of UTC. This is more in line with convention. [#8594]

astropy.io.ascii

• IPAC tables now output data types of float instead of double, or int instead of long, based on the column dtype.itemsize. [#8216]

astropy.io.misc

• Unit equivalencies can now be serialized to ASDF. [#8252]

astropy.modeling

• Composition of model classes is deprecated and will be removed in 4.0. Composition of model instances remain unaffected. [#8234, #8408]

astropy.stats

• The BoxLeastSquares and LombScargle classes have been moved to the astropy.timeseries.periodograms module and will now emit a deprecation warning when imported from astropy.stats. [#8591]

astropy.table

• Converting an empty table to an array using as_array method now returns an empty array instead of None. [#8647]

• Changed the behavior when slicing a table (either in rows or with a list of column names) so now the sliced output gets a light (key-only) copy of meta instead of a deepcopy. Changed the Table.meta class-level descriptor so that assigning directly to meta, e.g. tbl.meta = new_meta no longer does a deepcopy and instead just directly assigns the new_meta object reference. Changed Table initialization so that input meta is copied only if copy=True. [#8404]

• Added a keyword names in Table.as_array(). If provided this specifies a list of column names to include for the returned structured array. [#8532]

astropy.tests

• Removed pytest_plugins as they are completely broken for pytest>=4. [#7786]

• Removed the astropy.tests.plugins.config plugin and removed the --astropy-config-dir and --astropy-cache-dir options from testing. Please use caching functionality that is natively in pytest. [#7787, #8489]

astropy.time

• The default time scale for epochs like ‘J2000’ or ‘B1975’ is now “tt”, which is the correct one for ‘J2000’ and avoids leap-second warnings for epochs in the far future or past. [#8600]

astropy.units

• Unit equivalencies can now be introspected. [#8252]

astropy.wcs

• The world_to_pixel, world_to_array_index*, pixel_to_world* and array_index_to_world* methods now all consistently return scalars, arrays, or objects not wrapped in a one-element tuple/list when only one scalar, array, or object (as was previously already the case for WCS.pixel_to_world and WCS.array_index_to_world). [#8663]

astropy.utils

• It is now possible to control the number of cores used by ProgressBar.map by passing a positive integer as the multiprocess keyword argument. Use True to use all cores. [#8083]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• BarycentricTrueEcliptic, HeliocentricTrueEcliptic and GeocentricTrueEcliptic now use the correct transformation (including nutation), whereas the new *MeanEcliptic classes use the nutation-free transformation. [#8394]

• Representations with float32 coordinates can now be transformed, although the output will always be float64. [#8759]

• Fixed bug that prevented using differentials with HCRS<->ICRS transformations. [#8794]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a bug where an exception was raised when writing a table which includes mixin columns (e.g. a Quantity column) and the output format was specified using the formats keyword. [#8681]

astropy.io.misc

• Fixed bug in ASDF tag that inadvertently introduced dependency on pytest. [#8456]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed slowness for certain compound models consisting of large numbers of multi-input models [#8338, #8349]

• Fixed bugs in fitting of compound models with units. [#8369]

astropy.nddata

• Fixed bug in reading multi-extension FITS files written by earlier versions of CCDData. [#8534]

• Fixed two errors in the way CCDData handles FITS files with WCS in the header. Some of the WCS keywords that should have been removed from the header were not, potentially leading to FITS files with inconsistent WCS. [#8602]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug when initializing from an empty list: Table([]) no longer results in a crash. [#8647]

• Fixed a bug when initializing from an existing Table. In this case the input meta argument was being ignored. Now the input meta, if supplied, will be used as the meta for the new Table. [#8404]

• Fix the conversion of bytes values to Python str with Table.tolist. [#8739]

astropy.time

• Fixed a number of issues to ensure a consistent output type resulting from multiplication or division involving a TimeDelta instance. The output is now always a TimeDelta if the result is a time unit (like u.s or u.d), otherwise it will be a Quantity. [#8356]

• Multiplication between two TimeDelta instances is now possible, resulting in a Quantity with units of time squared (division already correctly resulted in a dimensionless Quantity). [#8356]

• Like for comparisons, addition, and subtraction of Time instances with with non-time instances, multiplication and division of TimeDelta instances with incompatible other instances no longer immediately raise an UnitsError or TypeError (depending on the other instance), but rather go through the regular Python mechanism of TimeDelta returning NotImplemented (which will lead to a regular TypeError unless the other instance can handle TimeDelta). [#8356]

• Corrected small rounding errors that could cause the jd2 values in Time to fall outside the range of -0.5 to 0.5. [#8763]

astropy.units

• Added a Quantity.to_string method to add flexibility to the string formatting of quantities. It produces unadorned or LaTeX strings, and accepts two different sets of delimiters in the latter case: inline and display. [#8313]

• Ensure classes that mimic quantities by having a unit attribute and/or to and to_value methods can be properly used to initialize Quantity or set Quantity instance items. [#8535]

• Add support for << to create logarithmic units. [#8290]

• Add support for the clip ufunc, which in numpy 1.17 is used to implement np.clip. As part of that, remove the Quantity.clip method under numpy 1.17. [#8747]

• Fix parsing of numerical powers in FITS-compatible units. [#8251]

astropy.wcs

• Added a PyUnitListProxy_richcmp method in UnitListProxy class to enable WCS.wcs.cunit equality testing. It helps to check whether the two instances of WCS.wcs.cunit are equal or not by comparing the data members of UnitListProxy class [#8480]

• Fixed SlicedLowLevelWCS when array_shape is None. [#8649]

• Do not attempt to delete repeated distortion keywords multiple times when loading distortions with _read_distortion_kw and _read_det2im_kw. [#8777]

Other Changes and Additions

• Update bundled expat to 2.2.6. [#8343]

• Added instructions for uploading releases to Zenodo. [#8395]

• The bug fixes to the behaviour of TimeDelta for multiplcation and division, which ensure that the output is now always a TimeDelta if the result is a time unit (like u.s or u.d) and otherwise a Quantity, imply that sometimes the output type will be different than it was before. [#8356]

• For types unrecognized by TimeDelta, multiplication and division now will consistently return a TypeError if the other instance cannot handle TimeDelta (rather than UnitsError or TypeError depending on presumed abilities of the other instance). [#8356]

• Multiplication between two TimeDelta instances will no longer result in an OperandTypeError, but rather result in a Quantity with units of time squared (division already correctly resulted in a dimensionless Quantity). [#8356]

• Made running the tests insensitive to local user configuration when running the tests in parallel mode or directly with pytest. [#8727]

• Added a narrative style guide to the documentation for contributor reference. [#8588]

• Ensure we call numpy equality functions in a way that reduces the number of DeprecationWarning. [#8755]

Installation

• We now require setuptools 30.3.0 or later to install the core astropy package. [#8240]

• We now define groups of dependencies that can be installed with pip, e.g. pip install astropy[all] (to install all optional dependencies). [#8198]

Version 3.1.2 (2019-02-23)

Bug fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Convert the default of QuantityAttribute, thereby catching the error case case of it being set to None at attribute creation, and giving a more useful error message in the process. [#8300]

astropy.cosmology

• Fix elliptic analytical solution for comoving distance. Only relevant for non-flat cosmologies without radiation and Om0 > Ode0. [#8391]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed slowness for certain compound models consisting of large numbers of multi-input models [#8338, #8349]

astropy.visualization.wcsaxes

• Fix a bug that caused an error when passing an array with all values the same to contour or contourf. [#8321]

• Fix a bug that caused contour and contourf to return None instead of the contour set. [#8321]

Version 3.1.1 (2018-12-31)

Bug fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix error when writing out empty table. [#8279]

astropy.io.fits

• fitsdiff --ignore-hdus now prints input filenames in the diff report instead of <HDUList object at 0x1150f9778>. [#8295]

astropy.units

• Ensure correctness of units when raising to a negative power. [#8263]

• Fix with_H0 equivalency to use the correct direction of conversion. [#8292]

Version 3.1 (2018-12-06)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• convolve now accepts any array-like input, not just numpy.ndarray or lists. [#7303]

• convolve Now raises AstropyUserWarning if nan_treatment=’interpolate’ and preserve_nan=False and NaN values are present post convolution. [#8088]

astropy.coordinates

• The SkyCoord.from_name constructor now has the ability to create coordinate objects by parsing object catalogue names that have embedded J-coordinates. [#7830]

• The new function make_transform_graph_docs can be used to create a docstring graph from a custom TransformGraph object. [#7135]

• KDTree for catalog matching is now built with sliding midpoint rule rather than standard. In code, this means setting compact_nodes=False and balanced_tree=False in cKDTree. The sliding midpoint rule is much more suitable for catalog matching, and results in 1000x speedup in some cases. [#7324]

• Additional information about a site loaded from the Astropy sites registry is now available in EarthLocation.info.meta. [#7857]

• Added a concatenate_representations function to combine coordinate representation data and any associated differentials. [#7922]

• BaseCoordinateFrame will now check for a method named _astropy_repr_in_frame when constructing the string forms of attributes. Allowing any class to control how BaseCoordinateFrame represents it when it is an attribute of a frame. [#7745]

• Some rarely-changed attributes of frame classes are now cached, resulting in speedups (up to 50% in some cases) when creating new scalar frame or SkyCoord objects. [#7949, #5952]

• Added a directional_offset_by method to SkyCoord that computes a new coordinate given a coordinate, position angle, and angular separation [#5727]

astropy.cosmology

• The default cosmology has been changed from WMAP9 to Planck15. [#8123]

• Distance calculations with LambaCDM with no radiation (T_CMB0=0) are now 20x faster by using elliptic integrals for non-flat cases. [#7155]

• Distance calculations with FlatLambaCDM with no radiation (T_CMB0=0) are now 20x faster by using the hypergeometric function solution for this special case. [#7087]

• Age calculations with FlatLambdaCDM with no radiation (Tcmb0=0) are now 1000x faster by using analytic solutions instead of integrating. [#7117]

astropy.io.ascii

• Latex reader now ignores \toprule, \midrule, and \bottomrule commands. [#7349]

• Added the RST (Restructured-text) table format and the fast version of the RDB reader to the set of formats that are guessed by default. [#5578]

• The read trace (used primarily for debugging) now includes guess argument sets that were skipped entirely e.g. for not supporting user-supplied kwargs. All guesses thus removed from filtered_guess_kwargs are now listed as “Disabled” at the beginning of the trace. [#5578]

• Emit a warning when reading an ECSV file without specifying the format and without PyYAML installed. Previously this silently fell through to parsing as a basic format file and the file metadata was lost. [#7580]

• Optionally allow writing masked columns to ECSV with the mask explicitly specified as a separate column instead of marking masked elements with “” (empty string). This allows handling the case of a masked string column with “” data rows. [#7481]

astropy.io.misc

• Added support for saving all representation classes and many coordinate frames to the asdf format. [#7079]

• Added support for saving models with units to the asdf format. [#7237]

• Added a new character_as_bytes keyword to the HDF5 Table reading function to control whether byte string columns in the HDF5 file are left as bytes or converted to unicode. The default is to read as bytes (character_as_bytes=True). [#7024, #8017]

astropy.io.fits

• HDUList.pop() now accepts string and tuple extension name specifications. [#7236]

• Add an ignore_hdus keyword to FITSDiff to allow ignoring HDUs by NAME when diffing two FITS files [#7538]

• Optionally allow writing masked columns to FITS with the mask explicitly specified as a separate column instead of using the FITS standard of certain embedded null values (NaN for float, TNULL for integers). This can be used to work around limitations in the FITS standard. [#7481]

• All time coordinates can now be written to and read from FITS binary tables, including those with vectorized locations. [#7430]

• The fitsheader command line tool now supports a dfits+fitsort mode, and the dotted notation for keywords (e.g. ESO.INS.ID). [#7240]

• Fall back to reading arrays using mode=’denywrite’ if mode=’readonly’ fails when using memory-mapping. This solves cases on some platforms when the available address space was less than the file size (even when using memory mapping). [#7926]

astropy.modeling

• Add a Multiply model which preserves unit through evaluate, unlike Scale which is dimensionless. [#7210]

• Add a uses_quantity property to Model which allows introspection of if the Model can accept Quantity objects. [#7417]

• Add a separability_matrix function which returns the correlation matrix of inputs and outputs. [#7803]

• Fixed compatibility of JointFitter with the latest version of Numpy. [#7984]

• Add prior and posterior constraints to modeling parameters. These are not used by any current fitters, but are provided to allow user code to experiment with Bayesian fitters. [#7558]

astropy.nddata

• NDUncertainty objects now have a quantity attribute for simple conversion to quantities. [#7704]

• Add a bitmask module that provides functions for manipulating bitmasks and data quality (DQ) arrays. [#7944]

astropy.stats

• Add an astropy.stats.bls module with an implementation of the “box least squares” periodogram that is commonly used for discovering transiting exoplanets and eclipsing binaries. [#7391]

astropy.table

• Added support for full use of Time mixin column for join, hstack, and vstack table operations. [#6888]

• Added a new table index engine, SCEngine, based on the Sorted Containers package. [#7574]

• Add a new keyword argument serialize_method to Table.write to control how Time and MaskedColumn columns are written. [#7481]

• Allow mixin columns to be used in table group and unique functions. This applies to both the key columns and the other data columns. [#7712]

• Added support for stacking Column, mixin column (e.g. Quantity, Time) or column-like objects. [#7674]

• Added support for inserting a row into a Table that has Time or TimeDelta column(s). [#7897]

astropy.tests

• Added an option --readonly to the test command to change the permissions on the temporary installation location to read-only. [#7598]

astropy.time

• Allow array-valued Time object to be modified in place. [#6028]

• Added support for missing values (masking) to the Time class. [#6028]

• Added supper for a ‘local’ time scale (for free-running clocks, etc.), and round-tripping to the corresponding FITS time scale. [#7122]

• Added datetime.timedelta format class for TimeDelta. [#7441]

• Added strftime and strptime methods to Time class. These methods are similar to those in the Python standard library time package and provide flexible input and output formatting. [#7323]

• Added datetime64 format to the Time class to support working with numpy.datetime64 dtype arrays. [#7361]

• Add fractional second support for strftime and strptime methods of Time class. [#7705]

• Added an insert method to allow inserting one or more values into a Time or TimeDelta object. [#7897]

• Remove timescale from string version of FITS format time string. The timescale is not part of the FITS standard and should not be included. This change may cause some compatibility issues for code that relies on round-tripping a FITS format string with a timescale. Strings generated from previous versions of this package are still understood but a DeprecationWarning will be issued. [#7870]

astropy.uncertainty

• This sub-package was added as a “preview” (i.e. API unstable), containing the Distribution class and associated convenience functions. [#6945]

astropy.units

• Add complex numbers support for Quantity._repr_latex_. [#7676]

• Add thermodynamic_temperature equivalency to convert between Jy/sr and “thermodynamic temperature” for cosmology. [#7054]

• Add millibar unit. [#7863]

• Add maggy and nanomaggy unit, as well as associated zero_point_flux equivalency. [#7891]

• AB and ST are now enabled by default, and have alternate names ABflux and STflux. [#7891]

• Added littleh unit and associated with_H0 equivalency. [#7970]

astropy.visualization

• Added imshow_norm function, which combines imshow and creation of a ImageNormalize object. [#7785]

astropy.visualization.wcsaxes

• Add support for setting set_separator(None) in WCSAxes to use default separators. [#7570]

• Added two keyword argument options to CoordinateHelper.set_format_unit: decimal can be used to specify whether to use decimal formatting for the labels (by default this is False for degrees and hours and True otherwise), and show_decimal_unit can be used to determine whether the units should be shown for decimal labels. [#7318]

• Added documentation for transform= and coord_meta=. [#7698]

• Allow coord_meta= to optionally include format_unit=. [#7848]

• Add support for more rcParams related to the grid, ticks, and labels, and should work with most built-in Matplotlib styles. [#7961]

• Improved rendering of outward-facing ticks. [#7961]

• Add support for tick_params (which is a standard Matplotlib function/method) on both the WCSAxes class and the individual CoordinateHelper classes. Note that this is provided for compatibility with Matplotlib syntax users may be familiar with, but it is not the preferred way to change settings. Instead, methods such as set_ticks should be preferred. [#7969]

• Moved the argument exclude_overlapping from set_ticks to set_ticklabel. [#7969]

• Added a pad= argument to set_ticklabel to provide a way to control the padding between ticks and tick labels. [#7969]

• Added support for setting the tick direction in set_ticks using the direction= keyword argument. [#7969]

astropy.wcs

• Map ITRS frames to terrestrial WCS coordinates. This will make it possible to use WCSAxes to make figures that combine both celestial and terrestrial features. An example is plotting the coordinates of an astronomical transient over an all- sky satellite image to illustrate the position relative to the Earth at the time of the event. The ITRS frame is identified with WCSs that use the TLON- and TLAT- coordinate types. There are several examples of WCSs where this syntax is used to describe terrestrial coordinate systems: Section 7.4.1 of WCS in FITS “Paper II” and the WCSTools documentation. [#6990]

• Added the abstract base class for the low-level WCS API described in APE 14 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1188875). [#7325]

• Add WCS.footprint_contains() function to check if the WCS footprint contains a given sky coordinate. [#7273]

• Added the abstract base class for the high-level WCS API described in APE 14 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1188875). [#7325]

• Added the high-level wrapper class for low-level WCS objects as described in APE 14 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1188875). [#7326]

• Added a new property WCS.has_distortion. [#7326]

• Deprecated _naxis1 and _naxis2 in favor of pixel_shape. [#7973]

• Added compatibility to wcslib version 6. [#8093]

API Changes

astropy.convolution

• kernel can now be a tuple. [#7561]

• Not technically an API changes, however, the doc string indicated that boundary=None was the default when actually it is boundary='fill'. The doc string has been corrected, however, someone may interpret this as an API change not realising that nothing has actually changed. [#7293]

• interpolate_replace_nans() can no longer accept the keyword argument preserve_nan. It is explicitly set to False. [#8088]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed astropy.coordinates.concatenate to include velocity data in the concatenation. [#7922]

• Changed the name of the single argument to Frame.realize_frame() from the (incorrect) representation_type to data. [#7923]

• Negative parallaxes passed to Distance() now raise an error by default (allow_negative=False), or are converted to NaN values with a warning (allow_negative=True). [#7988]

• Negating a SphericalRepresentation object now changes the angular coordinates (by rotating 180º) instead of negating the distance. [#7988]

• Creation of new frames now generally creates copies of frame attributes, rather than inconsistently either copying or making references. [#8204]

• The frame class method is_equivalent_frame now checks for equality of components to determine if a frame is the same when it has frame attributes that are representations, rather than checking if they are the same object. [#8218]

astropy.io.ascii

• If a fast reader is explicitly selected (e.g. fast_reader='force') and options which are incompatible with the fast reader are provided (e.g. quotechar='##') then now a ParameterError exception will be raised. [#5578]

• The fast readers will now raise InconsistentTableError instead of CParserError if the number of data and header columns do not match. [#5578]

• Changed a number of ValueError exceptions to InconsistentTableError in places where the exception is related to parsing a table which is inconsistent with the specified table format. Note that InconsistentTableError inherits from ValueError so no user code changes are required. [#7425]

astropy.io.fits

• The fits.table_to_hdu() function will translate any column format attributes to a TDISPn format string, if possible, and store it as a TDISPn keyword in the HDU header. [#7226]

astropy.modeling

• Change the order of the return values from FittingWithOutlierRemoval, such that fitted_model comes first, for consistency with other fitters. For the second value, return only a boolean outlier mask, instead of the previous MaskedArray (which included a copy of the input data that was both redundant and inadvertently corrupted at masked points). Return a consistent type for the second value when niter=0. [#7407]

• Set the minimum value for the bolometric_flux parameter of the BlackBody1D model to zero. [#7045]

astropy.nddata

• Add two new uncertainty classes, astropy.nddata.VarianceUncertainty and astropy.nddata.InverseVariance. [#6971]

astropy.stats

• String values can now be used for the cenfunc and stdfunc keywords in the SigmaClip class and sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions. [#7478]

• The SigmaClip class and sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions now have a masked keyword, which can be used to return either a masked array (default) or an ndarray with the min/max values. [#7478]

• The iters keyword has been renamed (and deprecated) to maxiters in the SigmaClip class and sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions. [#7478]

astropy.table

• Table.read() on a FITS binary table file will convert any TDISPn header keywords to a Python formatting string when possible, and store it in the column format attribute. [#7226]

• No values provided to stack will now raise ValueError rather than TypeError. [#7674]

astropy.tests

• from astropy.tests.helper import * no longer includes quantity_allclose. However, from astropy.tests.helper import quantity_allclose would still work. [#7381]

• warnings_to_ignore_by_pyver option in enable_deprecations_as_exceptions() now takes None as key. Any deprecation message that is mapped to None will be ignored regardless of the Python version. [#7790]

astropy.time

• Added the ability to use local as time scale in Time and TimeDelta. [#6487]

• Comparisons, addition, and subtraction of Time instances with non-time instances will now return NotImplemented rather than raise the Time-specific OperandTypeError. This will generally lead to a regular TypeError. As a result, OperandTypeError now only occurs if the operation is between Time instances of incompatible type or scale. [#7584]

astropy.units

• In UnitBase.compose(), if a sequence (list|tuple) is passed in to units, the default for include_prefix_units is set to True, so that no units get ignored. [#6957]

• Negative parallaxes are now converted to NaN values when using the parallax equivalency. [#7988]

astropy.utils

• InheritDocstrings now also works on class properties. [#7166]

• diff_values(), report_diff_values(), and where_not_allclose() utility functions are moved from astropy.io.fits.diff. [#7444]

• invalidate_caches() has been removed from the astropy.utils.compat namespace, use it directly from importlib. [#7872]

astropy.visualization

• In ImageNormalize, the default for clip is set to True. [#7800]

• Changed AsymmetricPercentileInterval and MinMaxInterval to ignore NaN values in arrays. [#7360]

• Automatically default to using grid_type='contours' in WCSAxes when using a custom Transform object if the transform has no inverse. [#7847]

Performance Improvements

• Reduced import time by more cautious use of the standard library. [#7647]

astropy.convolution

• Major performance overhaul to convolve(). [#7293]

• convolve(): Boundaries fill, extend, and wrap now use a single implementation that pads the image with the correct boundary values before convolving. The runtimes of these three were significantly skewed. They now have equivalent runtimes that are also faster than before due to performant contiguous memory access. However, this does increase the memory footprint as an entire new image array is required plus that needed for the padded region.[#7293]

• convolve(): Core computation ported from Cython to C. Several optimization techniques have been implemented to achieve performance gains, e.g. compiler hoisting, and vectorization, etc. Compiler optimization level -O2 required for hoisting and -O3 for vectorization. [#7293]

• convolve(): nan_treatment=‘interpolate’ was slow to compute irrespective of whether any NaN values exist within the array. The input array is now checked for NaN values and interpolation is disabled if non are found. This is a significant performance boost for arrays without NaN values. [#7293]

astropy.coordinates

• Sped up creating SkyCoord objects by a factor of ~2 in some cases. [#7615]

• Sped up getting xyz vectors from CartesianRepresentation (which is used a lot internally). [#7638]

• Sped up transformations and some representation methods by replacing python code with (compiled) erfa ufuncs. [#7639]

• Sped up adding differential (velocity) data to representations by a factor of ~20, which improves the speed of frame and SkyCoord initialization. [#7924]

• Refactored SkyCoord initializer to improve performance and code clarity. [#7958]

• Sped up initialization of Longitude by ~40%. [#7616]

astropy.stats

• The SigmaClip class and sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions are now significantly faster. [#7478]

• A Cython implementation for astropy.stats.kuiper_two and a vectorized implementation for astropy.stats.kuiper_false_positive_probability have been added, speeding up both functions. [#8104]

astropy.units

• Sped up creating new composite units, and raising units to some power [#7549, #7649]

• Sped up Unit.to when target unit is the same as the original unit. [#7643]

• Lazy-load scipy.special to shorten astropy.units import time. [#7636]

astropy.visualization

• Significantly sped up drawing of contours in WCSAxes. [#7568]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed bug in convolve_fft where masked input was copied with numpy.asarray instead of numpy.asanyarray. numpy.asarray removes the mask subclass causing numpy.ma.ismasked(input) to fail, causing convolve_fft to ignore all masked input. [#8137]

• Remove function side-effects of input data from convolve_fft. It was possible for input data to remain modified if particular exceptions were raised. [#8152]

astropy.coordinates

• EarthLocation.of_address now uses the OpenStreetMap geocoding API by default to retrieve coordinates, with the Google API (which now requires an API key) as an option. [#7918]

• Fixed a bug that caused frame objects with NaN distances to have NaN sky positions, even if valid sky coordinates were specified. [#7988]

• Fixed represent_as() to not round-trip through cartesian if the same representation class as the instance is passed in. [#7988]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a problem when guess=True that fast_reader options could be dropped after the first fast reader class was tried. [#5578]

• Units in CDS-formatted tables are now parsed correctly by the units module. [#7348]

astropy.io.misc

• Fixed bug when writing a table with masked columns to HDF5. Previously the mask was being silently dropped. If the serialize_meta option is enabled the data mask will now be written as an additional column and the masked columns will round-trip correctly. [#7481]

• Fixed a bug where writing to HDF5 failed for for tables with columns of unicode strings. Now those columns are first encoded to UTF-8 and written as byte strings. [#7024, #8017]

• Fixed a bug with serializing the bounding_box of models initialized with Quantities . [#8052]

astropy.io.fits

• Added support for copy.copy and copy.deepcopy for HDUList. [#7218]

• Override HDUList.copy() to return a shallow HDUList instance. [#7218]

astropy.modeling

• Fix behaviour of certain models with units, by making certain unit-related attributes readonly. [#7210]

• Fixed an issue with validating a bounding_box whose items are Quantities. [#8052]

• Fix Moffat1D and Moffat2D derivatives. [#8108]

astropy.nddata

• Fixed rounding behavior in overlap_slices for even-sized small arrays. [#7859]

• Added support for pickling NDData instances that have an uncertainty. [#7383]

astropy.stats

• Fix errors in kuiper_false_positive_probability. [#7975]

astropy.tests

• Fixing bug that prevented to run the doctests on only a single rst documentation file rather than all of them. [#8055]

astropy.time

• Fix a bug when setting a TimeDelta array item with plain float value(s). This was always interpreted as a JD (day) value regardless of the TimeDelta format. [#7990]

astropy.units

• To simplify fast creation of Quantity instances from arrays, one can now write array << unit (equivalent to Quantity(array, unit, copy=False)). If array is already a Quantity, this will convert the quantity to the requested units; in-place conversion can be done with quantity <<= unit. [#7734]

astropy.utils

• Fixed a bug due to which report_diff_values() was reporting incorrect number of differences when comparing two numpy.ndarray. [#7470]

• The download progress bar is now only displayed in terminals, to avoid polluting piped output. [#7577]

• Ignore URL mirror caching when there is no internet. [#8163]

astropy.visualization

• Right ascension coordinates are now shown in hours by default, and the set_format_unit method on CoordinateHelper now works correctly with angle coordinates. [#7215]

Other Changes and Additions

• The documentation build now uses the Sphinx configuration from sphinx-astropy rather than from astropy-helpers. [#7139]

• Versions of Numpy <1.13 are no longer supported. [#7058]

• Running tests now suppresses the output of the installation stage by default, to allow easier viewing of the test results. To re-enable the output as before, use python setup.py test --verbose-install. [#7512]

• The ERFA functions are now wrapped in ufuncs instead of custom C code, leading to some speed improvements, and setting the stage for allowing overrides with __array_ufunc__. [#7502]

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.450. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#8014]

• The representation keywords in coordinate frames are now deprecated in favor of the representation_type keywords (which are less ambiguously named). [#8119]

Version 3.0.5 (2018-10-14)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed bug in which consecutive StaticMatrixTransform’s in a frame transform path would be combined in the incorrect order. [#7707]

astropy.tests

• Fixing bug that doctests were not picked up from the narrative documentation when tests were run for all modules. [#7767]

Version 3.0.4 (2018-08-02)

API Changes

astropy.table

• The private _parent attribute in the info attribute of table columns was changed from a direct reference to the parent column to a weak reference. This was in response to a memory leak caused by having a circular reference cycle. This change means that expressions like col[3:5].info will now fail because at the point of the info property being evaluated the col[3:5] weak reference is dead. Instead force a reference with c = col[3:5] followed by c.info.indices. [#6277, #7448]

Bug Fixes

astropy.nddata

• Fixed an bug when creating the WCS of a cutout (see nddata.Cutout2D) when input image’s WCS contains SIP distortion corrections by adjusting the crpix of the astropy.wcs.Sip (in addition to adjusting the crpix of the astropy.wcs.WCS object). This bug had the potential to produce large errors in WCS coordinate transformations depending on the position of the cutout relative to the input image’s crpix. [#7556, #7550]

astropy.table

• Fix memory leak where updating a table column or deleting a table object was not releasing the memory due to a reference cycle in the column info attributes. [#6277, #7448]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed an bug when creating the WCS slice (see WCS.slice()) when WCS contains SIP distortion corrections by adjusting the WCS.sip.crpix in addition to adjusting WCS.wcs.crpix. This bug had the potential to produce large errors in WCS coordinate transformations depending on the position of the slice relative to WCS.wcs.crpix. [#7556, #7550]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled wcslib to v 5.19.1 [#7688]

Version 3.0.3 (2018-06-01)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix stripping correct (header) comment line from meta['comments'] in the CommentedHeader reader for all header_start settings. [#7508]

astropy.io.fits

• Raise error when attempting to open gzipped FITS file in ‘append’ mode. [#7473]

• Fix a bug when writing to FITS a table that has a column description with embedded blank lines. [#7482]

astropy.tests

• Enabling running tests for multiple packages when specified comma separated. [#7463]

Version 3.0.2 (2018-04-23)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Computing a 3D separation between two SkyCoord objects (with the separation_3d method) now works with or without velocity data attached to the objects. [#7387]

astropy.io.votable

• Fix validate with xmllint=True. [#7255, #7283]

astropy.modeling

• FittingWithOutlierRemoval now handles model sets, as long as the underlying fitter supports masked values. [#7199]

• Remove assumption that model_set_axis == 0 for 2D models in LinearLSQFitter. [#7317, #7199]

• Fix the shape of the outputs when a model set is evaluated with model_set_axis=False . [#7317]

astropy.stats

• Accept a tuple for the axis parameter in sigma_clip, like the underlying numpy functions and some other functions in stats. [#7199]

astropy.tests

• The function quantity_allclose was moved to the units package with the new, shorter name allclose. This eliminates a runtime dependency on pytest which was causing issues for some affiliated packages. The old import will continue to work but may be deprecated in the future. [#7252]

astropy.units

• Added a units-aware allclose function (this was previously available in the tests module as quantity_allclose). To complement allclose, a new isclose function is also added and backported. [#7252]

Version 3.0.1 (2018-03-12)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a unicode decode error when reading a table with non-ASCII characters. The fast C reader cannot handle unicode so the code now uses the pure-Python reader in this case. [#7103]

astropy.io.fits

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.430. This is to remedy a critical security vulnerability that was identified by NASA. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#7274]

astropy.io.misc

• Make sure that a sufficiently recent version of ASDF is installed when running test suite against ASDF tags and schemas. [#7205]

astropy.io.registry

• Fix reading files with serialized metadata when using a Table subclass. [#7213]

astropy.io.votable

• Fix lookup fields by ID. [#7208]

astropy.modeling

• Fix model set evaluation over common input when model_set_axis > 0. [#7222]

• Fixed the evaluation of compound models with units. This required adding the ability to have input_units_strict and input_units_allow_dimensionless be dictionaries with input names as keys. [#6952]

astropy.units

• quantity_helper no longer requires scipy>=0.18. [#7219]

Version 3.0 (2018-02-12)

New Features

astropy.constants

• New context manager set_enabled_constants to temporarily use an older version. [#7008]

astropy.coordinates

• The Distance object now accepts parallax as a keyword in the initializer, and supports retrieving a parallax (as an Angle) via the .parallax attributes. [#6855]

• The coordinate frame classes (subclasses of BaseCoordinateFrame) now always have .velocity, .proper_motion, and .radial_velocity properties that provide shorthands to the full-space Cartesian velocity as a CartesianDifferential, the 2D proper motion as a Quantity, and the radial or line-of-sight velocity as a Quantity. [#6869]

• SkyCoord objects now support storing and transforming differentials - i.e., both radial velocities and proper motions. [#6944]

• All frame classes now automatically get sensible representation mappings for velocity components. For example, d_x, d_y, d_z are all automatically mapped to frame component namse v_x, v_y, v_z. [#6856]

• SkyCoord objects now support updating the position of a source given its space motion and a new time or time difference. [#6872]

• The frame classes now accept a representation class or differential class, or string names for either, through the keyword arguments representation_type and differential_type instead of representation and differential_cls. [#6873]

• The frame classes (and SkyCoord) now give more useful error messages when incorrect attribute names are given. Instead of using the representation attribute names, they use the frame attribute names. [#7106]

• EarthLocation now has a method to compute the gravitational redshift due due to solar system bodies. [#6861, #6935]

• EarthLocation now has a get_gcrs convenience method to get the location in GCRS coordinates. [#6861, #6935]

astropy.io.fits

• Expanded the FITS Column interface to accept attributes pertaining to the FITS World Coordinate System, which includes spatial(celestial) and time coordinates. [#6359]

• Added ver attribute to set the EXTVER header keyword to ImageHDU and TableHDU. [#6454]

• The performance for reading FITS tables has been significantly improved, in particular for cases where the tables contain one or more string columns and when done through Table.read. [#6821]

• The performance for writing tables from Table.write has now been significantly improved for tables containing one or more string columns. [#6920]

• The Table.read now supports a memmap= keyword argument to control whether or not to use memory mapping when reading the table. [#6821]

• When reading FITS tables with fits.open, a new keyword argument character_as_bytes can be passed - when set to True, character columns are returned as Numpy byte arrays (Numpy type S) while when set to False, the same columns are decoded to Unicode strings (Numpy type U) which uses more memory. [#6821]

• The table_to_hdu function and the BinTableHDU.from_columns and FITS_rec.from_columns methods now include a character_as_bytes keyword argument - if set to True, then when string columns are accessed, byte columns will be returned, which can provide significantly improved performance. [#6920]

• Added support for writing and reading back a table which has “mixin columns” such as SkyCoord or EarthLocation with no loss of information. [#6912]

• Enable tab-completion for FITS_rec column names and Header keywords with IPython 5 and later. [#7071]

astropy.io.misc

• When writing to HDF5 files, the serialized metadata are now saved in a new dataset, instead of the HDF5 dataset attributes. This allows for metadata of any dimensions. [#6304]

• Added support in HDF5 for writing and reading back a table which has “mixin columns” such as SkyCoord or EarthLocation with no loss of information. [#7007]

• Add implementations of astropy-specific ASDF tag types. [#6790]

• Add ASDF tag and schema for ICRSCoord. [#6904]

astropy.modeling

• Add unit support for tabular models. [#6529]

• A deepcopy() method was added to models. [#6515]

• Added units support to AffineTransformation. [#6853]

• Added is_separable function to modeling to test the separability of a model. [#6746]

• Added Model.separable property. It returns a boolean value or None if not set. [#6746]

• Support masked array values in LinearLSQFitter (instead of silently ignoring the mask). [#6927]

astropy.stats

• Added false alarm probability computation to astropy.stats.LombScargle [#6488]

• Implemented Kuiper functions in astropy.stats [#3724, #6565]

astropy.table

• Added support for reading and writing astropy.time.Time Table columns to and from FITS tables, to the extent supported by the FITS standard. [#6176]

• Improved exception handling and error messages when column format attribute is incorrect for the column type. [#6385]

• Allow to pass htmldict option to the jsviewer writer. [#6551]

• Added new table operation astropy.table.setdiff that returns the set difference of table rows for two tables. [#6443]

• Added support for reading time columns in FITS compliant binary tables as astropy.time.Time Table columns. [#6442]

• Allowed to remove table rows through the __delitem__ method. [#5839]

• Added a new showtable command-line script to view binary or ASCII table files. [#6859]

• Added new table property astropy.table.Table.loc_indices that returns the location of rows by indexes. [#6831]

• Allow updating of table by indices through the property astropy.table.Table.loc. [#6831]

• Enable tab-completion for column names with IPython 5 and later. [#7071]

• Allow getting and setting a table Row using multiple column names. [#7107]

astropy.tests

• Split pytest plugins into separate modules. Move remotedata, openfiles, doctestplus plugins to standalone repositories. [#6384, #6606]

• When testing, astropy (or the package being tested) is now installed to a temporary directory instead of copying the build. This allows entry points to work correctly. [#6890]

• The tests_require setting in setup.py now works properly when running ‘python setup.py test’. [#6892]

astropy.units

• Deprecated conversion of quantities to truth values. Currently, the expression bool(0 * u.dimensionless_unscaled) evaluates to True. In the future, attempting to convert a Quantity to a bool will raise ValueError. [#6580, #6590]

• Modify the brightness_temperature equivalency to provide a surface brightness equivalency instead of the awkward assumed-per-beam equivalency that previously existed [#5173, #6663]

• Support was added for a number of scipy.special functions. [#6852]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.console.ProgressBar.map class method now supports the ipython_widget option. You can now pass it both multiprocess=True and ipython_widget=True to get both multiprocess speedup and a progress bar widget in an IPython Notebook. [#6368]

• The astropy.utils.compat.funcsigs module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘inspect’ module directly instead. [#6598]

• The astropy.utils.compat.futures module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘concurrent.futures’ module directly instead. [#6598]

• JsonCustomEncoder is expanded to handle Quantity and UnitBase. [#5471]

• Added a dcip_xy method to IERS that interpolates along the dX_2000A and dY_2000A columns of the IERS table. Hence, the data for the CIP offsets is now available for use in coordinate frame conversion. [#5837]

• The functions matmul, broadcast_arrays, broadcast_to of the astropy.utils.compat.numpy module have been deprecated. Use the NumPy functions directly. [#6691]

• The astropy.utils.console.ProgressBar.map class method now returns results in sequential order. Previously, if you set multiprocess=True, then the results could arrive in any arbitrary order, which could be a nasty shock. Although the function will still be evaluated on the items in arbitrary order, the return values will arrive in the same order in which the input items were provided. The method is now a thin wrapper around astropy.utils.console.ProgressBar.map_unordered, which preserves the old behavior. [#6439]

astropy.visualization

• Enable Matplotlib’s subtraction shorthand syntax for composing and inverting transformations for the WCSWorld2PixelTransform and WCSPixel2WorldTransform classes by setting has_inverse to True. In order to implement a unit test, also implement the equality comparison operator for both classes. [#6531]

• Added automatic hiding of axes labels when no tick labels are drawn on that axis. This parameter can be configured with WCSAxes.coords[*].set_axislabel_visibility_rule so that labels are automatically hidden when no ticks are drawn or always shown. [#6774]

astropy.wcs

• Added a new function celestial_frame_to_wcs to convert from coordinate frames to WCS (the opposite of what wcs_to_celestial_frame currently does. [#6481]

• wcslib was updated to v 5.18. [#7066]

API Changes

astropy.convolution

• Gaussian2DKernel now accepts x_stddev in place of stddev with an option for y_stddev, if different. It also accepts theta like Gaussian2D model. [#3605, #6748]

astropy.coordinates

• Deprecated recommended_units for representations. These were used to ensure that any angle was presented in degrees in sky coordinates and frames. This is more logically done in the frame itself. [#6858]

• As noted above, the frame class attributes representation and differential_cls are being replaced by representation_type and differential_type. In the next version, using representation will raise a deprecation warning. [#6873]

• Coordinate frame classes now can’t be added to the frame transform graph if they have frame attribute names that conflict with any component names. This is so SkyCoord can uniquely identify and distinguish frame attributes from frame components. [#6871]

• Slicing and reshaping of SkyCoord and coordinate frames no longer passes the new object through __init__, but directly sets attributes on a new instance. This speeds up those methods by an order of magnitude, but means that any customization done in __init__ is by-passed. [#6941]

astropy.io.ascii

• Allow ECSV files to be auto-identified by Table.read or Table.write based on the .ecsv file name suffix. In this case it is not required to provide the format keyword. [#6552]

astropy.io.fits

• Automatically detect and handle compression in FITS files that are opened by passing a file handle to fits.open [#6373]

• Remove the nonstandard checksum option. [#6571]

astropy.io.misc

• When writing to HDF5 files, the serialized metadata are now saved in a new dataset instead of the HDF5 dataset attributes. This allows for metadata of any dimensions. [#6304]

• Deprecated the usecPickle kwarg of fnunpickle and fnpickle as it was needed only for Python2 usage. [#6655]

astropy.io.votable

• Add handling of tree.Group elements to tree.Resource. Unified I/O or conversion to astropy tables is not affected. [#6262]

astropy.modeling

• Removed deprecated GaussianAbsorption1D model. Use Const1D - Gaussian1D instead. [#6542]

• Removed the registry from modeling. [#6706]

astropy.table

• When setting the column format attribute the value is now immediately validated. Previously one could set to any value and it was only checked when actually formatting the column. [#6385]

• Deprecated the python3_only kwarg of the convert_bytestring_to_unicode and convert_unicode_to_bytestring methods it was needed only for Python2 usage. [#6655]

• When reading in FITS tables with Table.read, string columns are now represented using Numpy byte (dtype S) arrays rather than Numpy unicode arrays (dtype U). The Column class then ensures the bytes are automatically converted to string as needed. [#6821]

• When getting a table row using multiple column names, if one of the names is not a valid column name then a KeyError exception is now raised (previously ValueError). When setting a table row, if the right hand side is not a sequence with the correct length then a ValueError is now raised (previously in certain cases a TypeError was raised). [#7107]

astropy.utils

• download_files_in_parallel now always uses cache=True to make the function work on Windows. [#6671]

astropy.visualization

• The Astropy matplotlib plot style has been deprecated. It will continue to work in future but is no longer documented. [#6991]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Frame objects now use the default differential even if the representation is explicitly provided as long as the representation provided is the same type as the default representation. [#6944]

• Coordinate frame classes now raise an error when they are added to the frame transform graph if they have frame attribute names that conflict with any component names. [#6871]

astropy.io.ascii

• Added support for reading very large tables in chunks to reduce memory usage. [#6458]

• Strip leading/trailing white-space from latex lines to avoid issues when matching \begin{tabular} statements. This is done by introducing a new LatexInputter class to override the BaseInputter. [#6311]

astropy.io.fits

• Properly handle opening of FITS files from http.client.HTTPResponse (i.e. it now works correctly when passing the results of urllib.request.urlopen to fits.open). [#6378]

• Fix the fitscheck script for updating invalid checksums, or removing checksums. [#6571]

• Fixed potential problems with the compression module [#6732]

• Always use the ‘D’ format for floating point values in ascii tables. [#6938]

astropy.table

• Fix getting a table row when using multiple column names (for example t[3]['a', 'b', 'c']). Also fix a problem when setting an entire row: if setting one of the right-hand side values failed this could result in a partial update of the referenced parent table before the exception is raised. [#7107]

astropy.time

• Initialization of Time instances with bytes or arrays with dtype S will now automatically attempt to decode as ASCII. This ensures Column instances with ASCII strings stored with dtype S can be used. [#6823, #6903]

astropy.units

• Fixed a bug that caused PLY files to not be generated correctly in Python 3. [#7174]

astropy.utils

• The deprecated decorator applied to a class will now modify the class itself, rather than to create a class that just looks and behave like the original. This is needed so that the Python 3 super without arguments works for decorated classes. [#6615]

• Fixed HomogeneousList when setting one item or a slice. [#6773]

• Also check the type when creating a new instance of HomogeneousList. [#6773]

• Make HomogeneousList work with iterators and generators when creating the instance, extending it, or using when setting a slice. [#6773]

Other Changes and Additions

• Versions of Python <3.5 are no longer supported. [#6556]

• Versions of Pytest <3.1 are no longer supported. [#6419]

• Versions of Numpy <1.10 are no longer supported. [#6593]

• The bundled CFITSIO was updated to version 3.41 [#6477]

• analytic_functions sub-package is removed. Use astropy.modeling.blackbody. [#6541]

• astropy.vo sub-package is removed. Use astropy.samp for SAMP and astroquery for VO cone search. [#6540]

• The guide to setting up Emacs for code development was simplified, and updated to recommend flycheck and flake8 for syntax checks. [#6692]

• The bundled version of PLY was updated to 3.10. [#7174]

Version 2.0.16 (2019-10-27)

Bug Fixes

astropy.time

• Fixed a troubling bug in which Time could loose precision, with deviations of 300 ns. [#9328]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated IERS A URLs due to USNO prolonged maintenance. [#9443]

Version 2.0.15 (2019-10-06)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug where the string representation of a BaseCoordinateFrame object could become garbled under specific circumstances when the frame defines custom component names via RepresentationMapping. [#8869]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix uint conversion in FITS_rec when slicing a table. [#8982]

• Fix reading of unsigned 8-bit integer with compressed fits. [#9219]

astropy.nddata

• Fixed a bug in overlap_slices where the "strict" mode was too strict for a small array along the upper edge of the large array. [#8901]

• Fixed a bug in overlap_slices where a NoOverlapError would be incorrectly raised for a 0-shaped small array at the origin. [#8901]

astropy.samp

• Fixed a bug that caused an incorrectly constructed warning message to raise an error. [#8966]

astropy.table

• Fix FixedWidthNoHeader to pay attention to data_start keyword when finding first data line to split columns [#8485, #8511]

• Fix bug when initializing Table with rows as a generator. [#9315]

• Fix join when there are multiple mixin (Quantity) columns as keys. [#9313]

astropy.units

• Quantity now preserves the dtype for anything that is floating point, including float16. [#8872]

• Unit() now accepts units with fractional exponents such as m(3/2) in the default/fits and vounit formats that would previously have been rejected for containing multiple solidi (/). [#9000]

• Fixed the LaTeX representation of units containing a superscript. [#9218]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed compatibility issues with latest versions of Matplotlib. [#8961]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated required version of Cython to v0.29.13 to make sure that generated C files are compatible with the upcoming Python 3.8 release as well as earlier supported versions of Python. [#9198]

Version 2.0.14 (2019-06-14)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fix Header.update which was dropping the comments when passed a Header object. [#8840]

astropy.modeling

• Moffat1D.fwhm and Moffat2D.fwhm will return a positive value when gamma is negative. [#8801, #8815]

astropy.units

• Fixed a bug that prevented EarthLocation from being initialized with numpy >=1.17. [#8849]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed quantity_support to work around the fact that matplotlib does not detect subclasses in its units framework. With this, Angle and other subclasses work correctly. [#8818]

• Fixed quantity_support to work properly if multiple context managers are nested. [#8844]

Version 2.0.13 (2019-06-08)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed bug in ColDefs._init_from_array() that caused unsigned datatypes with the opposite endianness as the host architecture to fail the TestColumnFunctions.test_coldefs_init_from_array unit test. [#8460]

astropy.io.misc

• Explicitly set PyYAML default flow style to None to ensure consistent astropy YAML output for PyYAML version 5.1 and later. [#8500]

astropy.io.votable

• Block floating-point columns from using repr format when converted to Table [#8358]

astropy.stats

• Fixed issue in bayesian_blocks when called with the ncp_prior keyword. [#8339]

astropy.units

• Fix take when one gets only a single element from a Quantity, ensuring it returns a Quantity rather than a scalar. [#8617]

Version 2.0.12 (2019-02-23)

New Features

astropy.utils

• The deprecated_renamed_argument decorator now capable deprecating an argument without renaming it. It also got a new alternative keyword argument to suggest alternative functionality instead of the removed one. [#8324]

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed bug in ColDefs._init_from_array() that caused non-scalar unsigned entries to not have the correct bzero value set. [#8353]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed compatibility of JointFitter with the latest version of Numpy. [#7984]

astropy.table

• Fix .quantity property of Column class for function-units (e.g., dex). Previously setting this was possible, but getting raised an error. [#8425]

• Fixes a bug where initializing a new Table from the final row of an existing Table failed. This happened when that row was generated using the item index [-1]. [#8422]

astropy.wcs

• Fix bug that caused WCS.has_celestial, wcs_to_celestial_frame, and other functionality depending on it to fail in the presence of correlated celestial and other axes. [#8420]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed make clean for the documentation on Windows to ensure it properly removes the api and generated directories. [#8346]

• Updating bundled pytest-openfiles to v0.3.2. [#8434]

• Making ErfaWarning and ErfaError available via astropy.utils.exceptions. [#8441]

Version 2.0.11 (2018-12-31)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix fast reader C tokenizer to handle double quotes in quoted field. [#8283]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix a bug in io.fits with writing Fortran-ordered arrays to file objects. [#8282]

astropy.units

• Add support for np.matmul as a ufunc (new in numpy 1.16). [#8264, #8305]

astropy.utils

• Fix failures caused by IERS_A_URL being unavailable by introducing IERS_A_URL_MIRROR. [#8308]

Version 2.0.10 (2018-12-04)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fix Moffat2DKernel’s FWHM computation, which has an influence on the default size of the kernel when no size is given. [#8105]

astropy.coordinates

• Disable of_address usage due to Google API now requiring API key. [#7993]

astropy.io.fits

• fits.append now correctly handles file objects with valid modes other than ostream. [#7856]

astropy.table

• Fix Table.show_in_notebook failure when mixin columns are present. [#8069]

astropy.tests

• Explicitly disallow incompatible versions of pytest when using the test runner. [#8188]

astropy.units

• Fixed the spelling of the ‘luminous emittance/illuminance’ physical property. [#7942]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug that caused origin to be incorrect if not specified. [#7927]

• Fixed a bug that caused an error when plotting grids multiple times with grid_type=’contours’. [#7927]

• Put an upper limit on the number of bins in hist and histogram and factor out calculation of bin edges into public function calculate_bin_edges. [#7991]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixing astropy.__citation__ to provide the full bibtex entry of the 2018 paper. [#8110]

• Pytest 4.0 is not supported by the 2.0.x LTS releases. [#8173]

• Updating bundled pytest-remotedata to v0.3.1. [#8174]

• Updating bundled pytest-doctestplus to v0.2.0. [#8175]

• Updating bundled pytest-openfiles to v0.3.0. [#8176]

• Adding warning_type keyword argument to the “deprecated” decorators to allow issuing custom warning types instead of the default AstropyDeprecationWarning. [#8178]

Version 2.0.9 (2018-10-14)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix reading of big files with the fast reader. [#7885]

astropy.io.fits

• HDUList.__contains__() now works with HDU arguments. That is, hdulist[0] in hdulist now works as expected. [#7282]

• HDUList s can now be written to streams in Python 3 [#7850]

astropy.nddata

• Fixed the bug in CCData.read when the HDU is not specified and the first one is empty so the function searches for the first HDU with data which may not have an image extension. [#7739]

astropy.stats

• Fixed bugs in biweight statistics functions where a constant data array (or if using the axis keyword, constant along an axis) would return NaN. [#7737]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug in to_pandas() where integer type masked columns were always getting converted to float. This could cause loss of precision. Now this only occurs if there are actually masked data values, in which case pandas does require the values to be float so that NaN can be used to mark the masked values. [#7741, #7747]

astropy.tests

• Change the name of the configuration variable controlling the location of the Astropy cache in the Pytest plugin from cache_dir to astropy_cache_dir. The command line flag also changed to --astropy-cache-dir. This prevents a conflict with the cache_dir variable provided by pytest itself. Also made similar change to config_dir option as a precaution. [#7721]

astropy.units

• UnrecognizedUnit instances can now be compared to any other object without raising TypeError. [#7606]

astropy.visualization

• Fix compatibility with Matplotlib 3.0. [#7839]

• Fix an issue that caused a crash when using WCSAxes with a custom Transform object and when using grid_type='contours' to plot a grid. [#7846]

astropy.wcs

• Instead of raising an error astropy.wcs now returns the input when the input has zero size. [#7746]

• Fix malloc(0) bug in pipeline_all_pixel2world() and pipeline_pix2foc(). They now raise an exception for input with zero coordinates, i.e. shape = (0, n). [#7806]

• Fixed an issue with scalar input when WCS.naxis is one. [#7858]

Other Changes and Additions

• Added a new astropy.__citation__ attribute which gives a citation for Astropy in bibtex format. Made sure that both this and astropy.__bibtex__ works outside the source environment, too. [#7718]

Version 2.0.8 (2018-08-02)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Correct data type conversion for non-float masked kernels. [#7542]

• Fix non-float or masked, zero sum kernels when normalize_kernel=False. Non-floats would yield a type error and masked kernels were not being filled. [#7541]

astropy.coordinates

• Ensure that relative humidities can be given as Quantities, rather than take any quantity and just strip its unit. [#7668]

astropy.nddata

• Fixed Cutout2D output WCS NAXIS values to reflect the cutout image size. [#7552]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug in add_columns method where rename_duplicate=True would cause an error if there were no duplicates. [#7540]

astropy.tests

• Fixed bug in python setup.py test --coverage on Windows machines. [#7673]

astropy.time

• Avoid rounding errors when converting Quantity to TimeDelta. [#7625]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug that caused the position of the tick values in decimal mode to be incorrectly determined. [#7332]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed a bug that caused wcs_to_celestial_frame, skycoord_to_pixel, and pixel_to_skycoord to raise an error if the axes of the celestial WCS were swapped. [#7691]

Version 2.0.7 (2018-06-01)

Bug Fixes

astropy.modeling

• Fixed Tabular models to not change the shape of data. [#7411]

astropy.stats

• In freedman_bin_width, if the data has too small IQR, raise ValueError. [#7248, #7402]

astropy.table

• Fix a performance issue in MaskedColumn where initialization was extremely slow for large arrays with the default mask=None. [#7422]

• Fix printing table row indexed with unsigned integer. [#7469]

• Fix copy of mask when copying a Table, as this is no more done systematically by Numpy since version 1.14. Also fixed a problem when MaskedColumn was initialized with mask=np.ma.nomask. [#7486]

astropy.time

• Fixed a bug in Time that raised an error when initializing a subclass of Time with a Time object. [#7453]

astropy.utils

• Fixed a bug that improperly handled unicode case of URL mirror in Python 2. [#7493]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug that prevented legends from being added to plots done with units. [#7510]

Other Changes and Additions

• Bundled pytest-remotedata plugin is upgraded to 0.3. [#7493]

Version 2.0.6 (2018-04-23)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• convolve(boundary=None) requires the kernel to be smaller than the image. This was never actually checked, it now is and an exception is raised. [#7313]

astropy.units

• u.quantity_input no longer errors if the return annotation for a function is None. [#7336, #7380]

astropy.visualization

• Explicitly default to origin=’lower’ in WCSAxes. [#7331]

• Lists of units are now converted in the Matplotlib unit converter. This means that for Matplotlib versions later than 2.2, more plotting functions now work with units (e.g. errorbar). [#7037]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.44. This is to remedy another critical security vulnerability that was identified by NASA. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#7370]

Version 2.0.5 (2018-03-12)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Add a workaround for a bug in the einsum function in Numpy 1.14.0. [#7187]

• Fix problems with printing Angle instances under numpy 1.14.1. [#7234]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed the fitsdiff script for matching fits file with one in a directory path. [#7085]

• Make sure that lazily-loaded HDUList is automatically loaded when calling hdulist.pop. [#7186]

astropy.modeling

• Propagate weights to underlying fitter in FittingWithOutlierRemoval [#7249]

astropy.tests

• Support dotted package names as namespace packages when gathering test coverage. [#7170]

astropy.visualization

• Matplotlib axes have the axisbelow property to control the z-order of ticks, tick labels, and grid lines. WCSAxes will now respect this property. This is useful for drawing scale bars or inset boxes, which should have a z-order that places them above all ticks and gridlines. [#7098]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated the bundled CFITSIO library to 3.430. This is to remedy a critical security vulnerability that was identified by NASA. See cextern/cfitsio/docs/changes.txt for additional information. [#7274, #7275]

Version 2.0.4 (2018-02-06)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed IndexError when preserve_nan=True in convolve_fft. Added testing with preserve_nan=True. [#7000]

astropy.coordinates

• The sites.json file is now parsed explicitly with a UTF-8 encoding. This means that future revisions to the file with unicode observatory names can be done without breaking the site registry parser. [#7082]

• Working around a bug in Numpy 1.14.0 that broke some coordinate transformations. [#7105]

• Fixed a bug where negative angles could be rounded wrongly when converting to a string with seconds omitted. [#7148]

astropy.io.fits

• When datafile is missing, fits.tabledump uses input file name to build output file name. Fixed how it gets input file name from HDUList. [#6976]

• Fix in-place updates to scaled columns. [#6956]

astropy.io.registry

• Fixed bug in identifying inherited registrations from multiple ancestors [#7156]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a bug in LevMarLSQFitter when fitting 2D models with constraints. [#6705]

astropy.utils

• download_file function will check for cache downloaded from mirror URL first before attempting actual download if primary URL is unavailable. [#6987]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed test failures for astropy.visualization.wcsaxes which were due to local matplotlibrc files being taken into account. [#7132]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed broken links in the documentation. [#6745]

• Substantial performance improvement (potentially >1000x for some cases) when converting non-scalar coordinates.Angle objects to strings. [#7004]

Version 2.0.3 (2017-12-13)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Ecliptic frame classes now support attributes v_x, v_y, v_z when using with a Cartesian representation. [#6569]

• Added a nicer error message when accidentally calling frame.representation instead of frame.data in the context of methods that use ._apply(). [#6561]

• Creating a new SkyCoord from a list of multiple SkyCoord objects now yield the correct type of frame, and works at all for non-equatorial frames. [#6612]

• Improved accuracy of velocity calculation in EarthLocation.get_gcrs_posvel. [#6699]

• Improved accuracy of radial velocity corrections in SkyCoord.radial_velocity_correction`. [#6861]

• The precision of ecliptic frames is now much better, after removing the nutation from the rotation and fixing the computation of the position of the Sun. [#6508]

astropy.extern

• Version 0.2.1 of pytest-astropy is included as an external package. [#6918]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix writing the result of fitsdiff to file with --output-file. [#6621]

• Fix a minor bug where FITS_rec instances can not be indexed with tuples and other sequences that end up with a scalar. [#6955, #6966]

astropy.io.misc

• Fix ImportError when hdf5 is imported first in a fresh Python interpreter in Python 3. [#6604, #6610]

astropy.nddata

• Suppress errors during WCS creation in CCDData.read(). [#6500]

• Fixed a problem with CCDData.read when the extension wasn’t given and the primary HDU contained no data but another HDU did. In that case the header were not correctly combined. [#6489]

astropy.stats

• Fixed an issue where the biweight statistics functions would sometimes cause runtime underflow/overflow errors for float32 input arrays. [#6905]

astropy.table

• Fixed a problem when printing a table when a column is deleted and garbage-collected, and the format function caching mechanism happens to re-use the same cache key. [#6714]

• Fixed a problem when comparing a unicode masked column (on left side) to a bytes masked column (on right side). [#6899]

• Fixed a problem in comparing masked columns in bytes and unicode when the unicode had masked entries. [#6899]

astropy.tests

• Fixed a bug that causes tests for rst files to not be run on certain platforms. [#6555, #6608]

• Fixed a bug that caused the doctestplus plugin to not work nicely with the hypothesis package. [#6605, #6609]

• Fixed a bug that meant that the data.astropy.org mirror could not be used when using –remote-data=astropy. [#6724]

• Support compatibility with new pytest-astropy plugins. [#6918]

• When testing, astropy (or the package being tested) is now installed to a temporary directory instead of copying the build. This allows entry points to work correctly. [#6890]

astropy.time

• Initialization of Time instances now is consistent for all formats to ensure that -0.5 <= jd2 < 0.5. [#6653]

astropy.units

• Ensure that Quantity slices can be set with objects that have a unit attribute (such as Column). [#6123]

astropy.utils

• download_files_in_parallel now respects the given timeout value. [#6658]

• Fixed bugs in remote data handling and also in IERS unit test related to path URL, and URI normalization on Windows. [#6651]

• Fixed a bug that caused get_pkg_data_fileobj to not work correctly when used with non-local data from inside packages. [#6724]

• Make sure get_pkg_data_fileobj fails if the URL can not be read, and correctly falls back on the mirror if necessary. [#6767]

• Fix the finddiff option in find_current_module to properly deal with submodules. [#6767]

• Fixed pyreadline import in utils.console.isatty for older IPython versions on Windows. [#6800]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed the vertical orientation of the fits2bitmap output bitmap image to match that of the FITS image. [#6844, #6969]

• Added a workaround for a bug in matplotlib so that the fits2bitmap script generates the correct output file type. [#6969]

Other Changes and Additions

• No longer require LaTeX to build the documentation locally and use mathjax instead. [#6701]

• Ensured that all tests use the Astropy data mirror if needed. [#6767]

Version 2.0.2 (2017-09-08)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Ensure transformations via ICRS also work for coordinates that use cartesian representations. [#6440]

• Fixed a bug that was preventing SkyCoord objects made from lists of other coordinate objects from being written out to ECSV files. [#6448]

astropy.io.fits

• Support the GZIP_2 FITS image compression algorithm as claimed in docs. [#6486]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed a bug that wrote out VO table as version 1.2 instead of 1.3. [#6521]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug when combining unicode columns via join or vstack. The character width of the output column was a factor of 4 larger than needed. [#6459]

astropy.tests

• Fixed running the test suite using –parallel. [#6415]

• Added error handling for attempting to run tests in parallel without having the pytest-xdist package installed. [#6416]

• Fixed issue running doctests with pytest>=3.2. [#6423, #6430]

• Fixed issue caused by antivirus software in response to malformed compressed files used for testing. [#6522]

• Updated top-level config file to properly ignore top-level directories. [#6449]

astropy.units

• Quantity._repr_latex_ now respects precision option from numpy printoptions. [#6412]

astropy.utils

• For the deprecated_renamed_argument decorator, refer to the deprecation‘s caller instead of astropy.utils.decorators, to makes it easier to find where the deprecation warnings comes from. [#6422]

Version 2.0.1 (2017-07-30)

Bug Fixes

astropy.constants

• Fixed Earth radius to be the IAU2015 value for the equatorial radius. The polar value had erroneously been used in 2.0. [#6400]

astropy.coordinates

• Added old frame attribute classes back to top-level namespace of astropy.coordinates. [#6357]

astropy.io.fits

• Scaling an image always uses user-supplied values when given. Added defaults for scaling when bscale/bzero are not present (float images). Fixed a small bug in when to reset _orig_bscale. [#5955]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a bug in initializing compound models with units. [#6398]

astropy.nddata

• Updating CCDData.read() to be more flexible with inputs, don’t try to delete keywords that are missing from the header. [#6388]

astropy.tests

• Fixed the test command that is run from setuptools to allow it to gracefully handle keyboard interrupts and pass them on to the pytest subprocess. This prompts pytest to teardown and display useful traceback and test information [#6369]

astropy.visualization

• Ticks and tick labels are now drawn in front of, rather than behind, gridlines in WCS axes. This improves legibility in situations where tick labels may be on the interior of the axes frame, such as the right ascension axis of an all-sky Aitoff or Mollweide projection. [#6361]

astropy.wcs

• Fix the missing wcskey part in _read_sip_kw, this will cause error when reading sip wcs while there is no default CRPIX1 CRPIX2 keywords and only CRPIX1n CRPIX2n in header. [#6372]

Version 2.0 (2017-07-07)

New Features

astropy.constants

• Constants are now organized into version modules, with physical CODATA constants in the codata2010 and codata2014 sub-modules, and astronomical constants defined by the IAU in the iau2012 and iau2015 sub-modules. The default constants in astropy.constants in Astropy 2.0 have been updated from iau2012 to iau2015 and from codata2010 to codata2014. The constants for 1.3 can be accessed in the astropyconst13 sub-module and the constants for 2.0 (the default in astropy.constants) can also be accessed in the astropyconst20 sub-module [#6083]

• The GM mass parameters recommended by IAU 2015 Resolution B 3 have been added as GM_sun, GM_jup, and GM_earth, for the Sun, Jupiter and the Earth. [#6083]

astropy.convolution

• Major change in convolution behavior and keyword arguments. Additional details are in the API section. [#5782]

• Convolution with un-normalized and un-normalizable kernels is now possible. [#5782]

• Add a new argument, normalization_rtol, to convolve_fft, allowing the user to specify the relative error tolerance in the normalization of the convolution kernel. [#5649, #5177]

• Models can now be convoluted using convolve or convolve_fft, which generates a regular compound model. [#6015]

astropy.coordinates

• Frame attributes set on SkyCoord are now always validated, and any ndarray-like operation (like slicing) will also be done on those. [#5751]

• Caching of all possible frame attributes was implemented. This greatly speeds up many SkyCoord operations. [#5703, #5751]

• A class hierarchy was added to allow the representation layer to store differentials (i.e., finite derivatives) of coordinates. This is intended to enable support for velocities in coordinate frames. [#5871]

• replicate_without_data and replicate methods were added to coordinate frames that allow copying an existing frame object with various reference or copy behaviors and possibly overriding frame attributes. [#6182]

• The representation class instances can now contain differential objects. This is primarily useful for internal operations that will provide support for transforming velocity components in coordinate frames. [#6169]

• EarthLocation.to_geodetic() (and EarthLocation.geodetic) now return namedtuples instead of regular tuples. [#6237]

• EarthLocation now has lat and lon properties (equivalent to, but preferred over, the previous latitude and longitude). [#6237]

• Added a radial_velocity_correction method to SkyCoord to do compute barycentric and heliocentric velocity corrections. [#5752]

• Added a new AffineTransform class for coordinate frame transformations. This class supports matrix operations with vector offsets in position or any differential quantities (so far, only velocity is supported). The matrix transform classes now subclass from the base affine transform. [#6218]

• Frame objects now have experimental support for velocity components. Most frames default to accepting proper motion components and radial velocity, and the velocities transform correctly for any transformation that uses one of the AffineTransform-type transformations. For other transformations a finite-difference velocity transformation is available, although it is not as numerically stable as those that use AffineTransform-type transformations. [#6219, #6226]

astropy.io.ascii

• Allow to specify encoding in ascii.read, only for Python 3 and with the pure-Python readers. [#5448]

• Writing latex tables with only a tabular environment is now possible by setting latexdict['tabletyle'] to None. [#6205]

• Allow ECSV format to support reading and writing mixin columns like Time, SkyCoord, Latitude, and EarthLocation. [#6181]

astropy.io.fits

• Checking available disk space before writing out file. [#5550, #4065]

• Change behavior to warn about units that are not FITS-compliant when writing a FITS file but not when reading. [#5675]

• Added absolute tolerance parameter when comparing FITS files. [#4729]

• New convenience function printdiff to print out diff reports. [#5759]

• Allow to instantiate a BinTableHDU directly from a Table object. [#6139]

astropy.io.misc

• YAML representer now also accepts numpy types. [#6077]

astropy.io.registry

• New functions to unregister readers, writers, and identifiers. [#6217]

astropy.modeling

• Added SmoothlyBrokenPowerLaw1D model. [#5656]

• Add n_submodels shared method to single and compound models, which allows users to get the number of components of a given single (compound) model. [#5747]

• Added a name setter for instances of _CompoundModel. [#5741]

• Added FWHM properties to Gaussian and Moffat models. [#6027]

• Added support for evaluating models and setting the results for inputs outside the bounding_box to a user specified fill_value. This is controlled by a new optional boolean keyword with_bounding_box. [#6081]

• Added infrastructure support for units on parameters and during model evaluation and fitting, added support for units on all functional, power-law, polynomial, and rotation models where this is appropriate. A new BlackBody1D model has been added. [#4855, #6183, #6204, #6235]

astropy.nddata

• Added an image class, CCDData. [#6173]

astropy.stats

• Added biweight_midcovariance function. [#5777]

• Added biweight_scale and biweight_midcorrelation functions. [#5991]

• median_absolute_deviation and mad_std have ignore_nan option that will use np.ma.median with nans masked out or np.nanmedian instead of np.median when computing the median. [#5232]

• Implemented statistical estimators for Ripley’s K Function. [#5712]

• Added SigmaClip class. [#6206]

• Added std_ddof keyword option to sigma_clipped_stats. [#6066, #6207]

astropy.table

• Issue a warning when assigning a string value to a column and the string gets truncated. This can occur because numpy string arrays are fixed-width and silently drop characters which do not fit within the fixed width. [#5624, #5819]

• Added functionality to allow astropy.units.Quantity to be written as a normal column to FITS files. [#5910]

• Add support for Quantity columns (within a QTable) in table join(), hstack() and vstack() operations. [#5841]

• Allow unicode strings to be stored in a Table bytestring column in Python 3 using UTF-8 encoding. Allow comparison and assignment of Python 3 str object in a bytestring column (numpy 'S' dtype). If comparison with str instead of bytes is a problem (and bytes is really more logical), please open an issue on GitHub. [#5700]

• Added functionality to allow astropy.units.Quantity to be read from and written to a VOtable file. [#6132]

• Added support for reading and writing a table with mixin columns like Time, SkyCoord, Latitude, and EarthLocation via the ASCII ECSV format. [#6181]

• Bug fix for MaskedColumn insert method, where fill_value attribute was not being passed along to the copy of the MaskedColumn that was returned. [#7585]

astropy.tests

• enable_deprecations_as_exceptions function now accepts additional user-defined module imports and warning messages to ignore. [#6223, #6334]

astropy.units

• The astropy.units.quantity_input decorator will now convert the output to the unit specified as a return annotation under Python 3. [#5606]

• Passing a logarithmic unit to the Quantity constructor now returns the appropriate logarithmic quantity class if subok=True. For instance, Quantity(1, u.dex(u.m), subok=True) yields <Dex 1.0 dex(m)>. [#5928]

• The quantity_input decorator now accepts a string physical type in addition to of a unit object to specify the expected input Quantity’s physical type. For example, @u.quantity_input(x='angle') is now functionally the same as @u.quantity_input(x=u.degree). [#3847]

• The quantity_input decorator now also supports unit checking for optional keyword arguments and accepts iterables of units or physical types for specifying multiple valid equivalent inputs. For example, @u.quantity_input(x=['angle', 'angular speed']) or @u.quantity_input(x=[u.radian, u.radian/u.yr]) would both allow either a Quantity angle or angular speed passed in to the argument x. [#5653]

• Added a new equivalence molar_mass_amu between g/mol to atomic mass units. [#6040, #6113]

• Quantity has gained a new to_value method which returns the value of the quantity in a given unit. [#6127]

• Quantity now supports the @ operator for matrix multiplication that was introduced in Python 3.5, for all supported versions of numpy. [#6144]

• Quantity supports the new __array_ufunc__ protocol introduced in numpy 1.13. As a result, operations that involve unit conversion will be sped up considerably (by up to a factor of two for costly operations such as trigonometric ones). [#2583]

astropy.utils

• Added a new dataurl_mirror configuration item in astropy.utils.data that is used to indicate a mirror for the astropy data server. [#5547]

• Added a new convenience method get_cached_urls to astropy.utils.data for getting a list of the URLs in your cache. [#6242]

astropy.wcs

• Upgraded the included wcslib to version 5.16. [#6225]

  The minimum required version of wcslib in is 5.14.

API Changes

astropy.analytic_functions

• This entire sub-package is deprecated because blackbody has been moved to astropy.modeling.blackbody. [#6191]

astropy.convolution

• Major change in convolution behavior and keyword arguments. astropy.convolution.convolve_fft replaced interpolate_nan with nan_treatment, and astropy.convolution.convolve received a new nan_treatment argument. astropy.convolution.convolve also no longer double-interpolates interpolates over NaNs, although that is now available as a separate astropy.convolution.interpolate_replace_nans function. See the backwards compatibility note for more on how to get the old behavior (and why you probably don’t want to.) [#5782]

astropy.coordinates

• The astropy.coordinates.Galactic frame previously was had the cartesian ordering ‘w’, ‘u’, ‘v’ (for ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’, respectively). This was an error and against the common convention. The ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ axes now map to ‘u’, ‘v’, and ‘w’, following the right-handed (‘u’ points to the Galactic center) convention. [#6330]

• Removed deprecated angles.rotation_matrix and angles.angle_axis. Use the routines in coordinates.matrix_utilities instead. [#6170]

• EarthLocation.latitude and EarthLocation.longitude are now deprecated in favor of EarthLocation.lat and EarthLocation.lon. They former will be removed in a future version. [#6237]

• The FrameAttribute class and subclasses have been renamed to just contain Attribute. For example, QuantityFrameAttribute is now QuantityAttribute. [#6300]

astropy.cosmology

• Cosmological models do not include any contribution from neutrinos or photons by default – that is, the default value of Tcmb0 is 0. This does not affect built in models (such as WMAP or Planck). [#6112]

astropy.io.fits

• Remove deprecated NumCode and ImgCode properties on FITS _ImageBaseHDU. Use module-level constants BITPIX2DTYPE and DTYPE2BITPIX instead. [#4993]

• comments meta key (which is io.ascii’s table convention) is output to COMMENT instead of COMMENTS header. Similarly, COMMENT headers are read into comments meta [#6097]

• Remove compatibility code which forced loading all HDUs on close. The old behavior can be used with lazy_load_hdus=False. Because of this change, trying to access the .data attribute from an HDU which is not loaded now raises a IndexError instead of a ValueError. [#6082]

• Deprecated clobber keyword; use overwrite. [#6203]

• Add EXTVER column to the output of HDUList.info(). [#6124]

astropy.modeling

• Removed deprecated Redshift model; Use RedshiftScaleFactor. [#6053]

• Removed deprecated Pix2Sky_AZP.check_mu and Pix2Sky_SZP.check_mu methods. [#6170]

• Deprecated GaussianAbsorption1D model, as it can be better represented by subtracting Gaussian1D from Const1D. [#6200]

• Added method sum_of_implicit_terms to Model, needed when performing a linear fit to a model that has built-in terms with no corresponding parameters (primarily the 1*x term of Shift). [#6174]

astropy.nddata

• Removed deprecated usage of parameter propagate_uncertainties as a positional keyword. [#6170]

• Removed deprecated support_correlated attribute. [#6170]

• Removed deprecated propagate_add, propagate_subtract, propagate_multiply and propagate_divide methods. [#6170]

astropy.stats

• Removed the deprecated sig and varfunc keywords in the sigma_clip function. [#5715]

• Added modify_sample_size keyword to biweight_midvariance function. [#5991]

astropy.table

• In Python 3, when getting an item from a bytestring Column it is now converted to str. This means comparing a single item to a bytes object will always fail, and instead one must compare with a str object. [#5700]

• Removed the deprecated data property of Row. [#5729]

• Removed the deprecated functions join, hstack, vstack and get_groups from np_utils. [#5729]

• Added name parameter to method astropy.table.Table.add_column and names parameter to method astropy.table.Table.add_columns, to provide the flexibility to add unnamed columns, mixin objects and also to specify explicit names. Default names will be used if not specified. [#5996]

• Added optional axis parameter to insert method for Column and MaskedColumn classes. [#6092]

astropy.units

• Moved units.cgs.emu to units.deprecated.emu due to ambiguous definition of “emu”. [#4918, #5906]

• jupiterMass, earthMass, jupiterRad, and earthRad no longer have their prefixed units included in the standard units. If needed, they can still be found in units.deprecated. [#5661]

• solLum,``solMass``, and solRad no longer have their prefixed units included in the standard units. If needed, they can still be found in units.required_by_vounit, and are enabled by default. [#5661]

• Removed deprecated Unit.get_converter. [#6170]

• Internally, astropy replaced use of .to(unit).value with the new to_value(unit) method, since this is somewhat faster. Any subclasses that overwrote .to, should also overwrite .to_value (or possibly just the private ._to_value method. (If you did this, please let us know what was lacking that made this necessary!). [#6137]

astropy.utils

• Removed the deprecated compatibility modules for Python 2.6 (argparse, fractions, gzip, odict, subprocess) [#5975,#6157,#6164]

• Removed the deprecated zest.releaser machinery. [#6282]

astropy.visualization

• Removed the deprecated scale_image function. [#6170]

astropy.vo

• Cone Search now issues deprecation warning because it is moved to Astroquery 0.3.5 and will be removed from Astropy in a future version. [#5558, #5904]

• The astropy.vo.samp package has been moved to astropy.samp, and no longer supports HTTPS/SSL. [#6201, #6213]

astropy.wcs

• Removed deprecated wcs.rotateCD. [#6170]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Major change in convolution behavior and keyword arguments: astropy.convolution.convolve was not performing normalized convolution in earlier versions of astropy. [#5782]

• Direct convolution previously implemented the wrong definition of convolution. This error only affects asymmetric kernels. [#6267]

astropy.coordinates

• The astropy.coordinates.Galactic frame had an incorrect ordering for the ‘u’, ‘v’, and ‘w’ cartesian coordinates. [#6330]

• The astropy.coordinates.search_around_sky, astropy.coordinates.search_around_3d, and SkyCoord equivalent methods now correctly yield an astropy.coordinates.Angle as the third return type even if there are no matches (previously it returned a raw Quantity). [#6347]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix an issue where the fast C-reader was dropping table comments for a table with no data lines. [#8274]

astropy.io.fits

• comments meta key (which is io.ascii’s table convention) is output to COMMENT instead of COMMENTS header. Similarly, COMMENT headers are read into comments meta [#6097]

• Use more sensible fix values for invalid NAXISj header values. [#5935]

• Close file on error to avoid creating a ResourceWarning warning about an unclosed file. [#6168, #6177]

astropy.modeling

• Creating a compound model where one of the submodels is a compound model whose parameters were changed now uses the updated parameters and not the parameters of the original model. [#5741]

• Allow Mapping and Identity to be fittable. [#6018]

• Gaussian models now impose positive stddev in fitting. [#6019]

• OrthoPolynomialBase (Chebyshev2D / Legendre2D) models were being evaluated incorrectly when part of a compound model (using the parameters from the original model), which in turn caused fitting to fail as a no-op. [#6085]

• Allow Ring2D to be defined using r_out. [#6192]

• Make LinearLSQFitter produce correct results with fixed model parameters and allow Shift and Scale to be fitted with LinearLSQFitter and LevMarLSQFitter. [#6174]

astropy.stats

• Allow to choose which median function is used in mad_std and median_absolute_deviation. And allow to use these functions with a multi-dimensional axis. [#5835]

• Fixed biweight_midvariance so that by default it returns a variance that agrees with the standard definition. [#5991]

astropy.table

• Fix a problem with vstack for bytes columns in Python 3. [#5628]

• Fix QTable add/insert row for multidimensional Quantity. [#6092]

astropy.time

• Fixed the initial condition of TimeFITS to allow scale, FITS scale and FITS realization to be checked and equated properly. [#6202]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed a bug that caused the default WCS to return coordinates offset by one. [#6339]

astropy.vo

• Fixed a bug in vo.samp when stopping a hub for which a lockfile was not created. [#6211]

Other Changes and Additions

• Numpy 1.7 and 1.8 are no longer supported. [#6006]

• Python 3.3 is no longer supported. [#6020]

• The bundled ERFA was updated to version 1.4.0. [#6239]

• The bundled version of pytest has now been removed, but the astropy.tests.helper.pytest import will continue to work properly. Affiliated packages should nevertheless transition to importing pytest directly rather than from astropy.tests.helper. This also means that pytest is now a formal requirement for testing for both Astropy and for affiliated packages. [#5694]

Version 1.3.3 (2017-05-29)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug where StaticMatrixTransform erroneously copied frame attributes from the input coordinate to the output frame. In practice, this didn’t actually affect any transforms in Astropy but may change behavior for users who explicitly used the StaticMatrixTransform in their own code. [#6045]

• Fixed get_icrs_coordinates to loop through all the urls in case one raises an exception. [#5864]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix table header not written out properly when fits.writeto() convenience function is used. [#6042]

• Fix writing out read-only arrays. [#6036]

• Extension headers are written out properly when the fits.update() convenience function is used. [#6058]

• Angstrom, erg, G, and barn are no more reported as deprecated FITS units. [#5929]

astropy.table

• Fix problem with Table pprint/pformat raising an exception for non-UTF-8 compliant bytestring data. [#6117]

astropy.units

• Allow strings ‘nan’ and ‘inf’ as Quantity inputs. [#5958]

• Add support for positive and divmod ufuncs (new in numpy 1.13). [#5998, #6020, #6116]

astropy.utils

• On systems that do not have pkg_resources non-numerical additions to version numbers like dev or rc1 are stripped in minversion to avoid a TypeError in distutils.version.LooseVersion [#5944]

• Fix auto_download setting ignored in Time.ut1. [#6033]

astropy.visualization

• Fix bug in ManualInterval which caused the limits to be returned incorrectly if set to zero, and fix defaults for ManualInterval in the presence of NaNs. [#6088]

• Get rid of warnings that occurred when slicing a cube due to the tick locator trying to find ticks for the sliced axis. [#6104]

• Accept normal Matplotlib keyword arguments in set_xlabel and set_ylabel functions. [#5686, #5692, #6060]

• Fix a bug that caused labels to be missing from frames with labels that could change direction mid-axis, such as EllipticalFrame. Also ensure that empty tick labels do not cause any warnings. [#6063]

Version 1.3.2 (2017-03-30)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Ensure that checking equivalence of SkyCoord objects works with non-scalar attributes [#5884, #5887]

• Ensure that transformation to frames with multi-dimensional attributes works as expected [#5890, #5897]

• Make sure all BaseRepresentation objects can be output as strings. [#5889, #5897]

astropy.units

• Add support for heaviside ufunc (new in numpy 1.13). [#5920]

astropy.utils

• Fix to allow the C-based _fast_iterparse() VOTable XML parser to relloc() its buffers instead of overflowing them. [#5824, #5869]

Other Changes and Additions

• File permissions are revised in the released source distribution. [#5912]

Version 1.3.1 (2017-03-18)

New Features

astropy.utils

• The deprecated_renamed_argument decorator got a new pending parameter to suppress the deprecation warnings. [#5761]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Changed SkyCoord so that frame attributes which are not valid for the current frame (but are valid for other frames) are stored on the SkyCoord instance instead of the underlying frame instance (e.g., setting relative_humidity on an ICRS SkyCoord instance.) [#5750]

• Ensured that position_angle and separation give correct answers for frames with different equinox (see #5722). [#5762]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix problem with padding bytes written for BinTable columns converted from unicode [#5280, #5287, #5288, #5296].

• Fix out-of-order TUNITn cards when writing tables to FITS. [#5720]

• Recognize PrimaryHDU when non boolean values are present for the ‘GROUPS’ header keyword. [#5808]

• Fix the insertion of new keywords in compressed image headers (CompImageHeader). [#5866]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a problem with setting bounding_box on 1D models. [#5718]

• Fixed a broadcasting problem with weighted fitting of 2D models with LevMarLSQFitter. [#5788]

• Fixed a problem with passing kwargs to fitters, specifically verblevel. [#5815]

• Changed FittingWithOutlierRemoval to reject on the residual to the fit [#5831]

astropy.stats

• Fix the psd normalization for Lomb-Scargle periodograms in the presence of noise. [#5713]

• Fix bug in the autofrequency range when minimum_frequency is specified but maximum_frequency is not. [#5738]

• Ensure that a masked array is returned when sigma clipping fully masked data. [#5711]

astropy.table

• Fix problem where key for caching column format function was not sufficiently unique. [#5803]

• Handle sorting NaNs and masked values in jsviewer. [#4052, #5572]

• Ensure mixin columns can be added to a table using a scalar value for the right-hand side if the type supports broadcasting. E.g., for an existing QTable, t['q'] = 3*u.m will now add a column as expected. [#5820]

• Fixes the bug of setting/getting values from rows/columns of a table using numpy array scalars. [#5772]

astropy.units

• Fixed problem where IrreducibleUnits could fail to unpickle. [#5868]

astropy.utils

• Avoid importing ipython in utils.console until it is necessary, to prevent deprecation warnings when importing, e.g., Column. [#5755]

astropy.visualization

• Avoid importing matplotlib.pyplot when importing astropy.visualization.wcsaxes. [#5680, #5684]

• Ignore Numpy warnings that happen in coordinate transforms in WCSAxes. [#5792]

• Fix compatibility issues between WCSAxes and Matplotlib 2.x. [#5786]

• Fix a bug that caused WCSAxes frame visual properties to not be copied over when resetting the WCS. [#5791]

astropy.extern

• Fixed a bug where PLY was overwriting its generated files. [#5728]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed a deprecation warning that occurred when running tests with astropy.test(). [#5689]

• The deprecation of the clobber argument (originally deprecated in 1.3.0) in the io.fits write functions was changed to a “pending” deprecation (without displaying warnings) for now. [#5761]

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers to v1.3.1. [#5880]

Version 1.3 (2016-12-22)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• The convolve and convolve_fft arguments now support a mask keyword, which allows them to also support NDData objects as inputs. [#5554]

astropy.coordinates

• Added an of_address classmethod to EarthLocation to enable fast creation of EarthLocation objects given an address by querying the Google maps API [#5154].

• A new routine, get_body_barycentric_posvel has been added that allows one to calculate positions as well as velocities for solar system bodies. For JPL kernels, this roughly doubles the execution time, so if one requires only the positions, one should use get_body_barycentric. [#5231]

• Transformations between coordinate systems can use the more accurate JPL ephemerides. [#5273, #5436]

• Arithmetic on representations, such as addition of two representations, multiplication with a Quantity, or calculating the norm via abs, has now become possible. Furthermore, there are new methods mean, sum, dot, and cross. For all these, the representations are treated as vectors in cartesian space (temporarily converting to CartesianRepresentation if necessary). [#5301] has now become possible. Furthermore, there are news methods mean, sum, dot, and cross with obvious meaning. [#5301] multiplication with a Quantity has now become possible. Furthermore, there are new methods norm, mean, sum, dot, and cross. In all operations, the representations are treated as vectors. They are temporarily converted to CartesianRepresentation if necessary. [#5301]

• CartesianRepresentation can be initialized with plain arrays by passing in a unit. Furthermore, for input with a vector array, the coordinates no longer have to be in the first dimension, but can be at any xyz_axis. To complement the latter, a new get_xyz(xyz_axis) method allows one to get a vector array out along a given axis. [#5439]

astropy.io.ascii

• Files with “Fortran-style” columns (i.e. double-precision scientific notation with a character other than “e”, like 1.495978707D+13) can now be parsed by the fast reader natively. [#5552]

• Allow round-tripping masked data tables in most formats by using an empty string '' as the default representation of masked values when writing. [#5347]

• Allow reading HTML tables with unicode column values in Python 2.7. [#5410]

• Check for self-consistency of ECSV header column names. [#5463]

• Produce warnings when writing an IPAC table from an astropy table that contains metadata not supported by the IPAC format. [#4700]

astropy.io.fits

• “Lazy” loading of HDUs now occurs - when an HDU is requested, the file is only read up to the point where that HDU is found. This can mean a substantial speedup when accessing files that have many HDUs. [#5065]

astropy.io.misc

• Added io.misc.yaml module to support serializing core astropy objects using the YAML protocol. [#5486]

astropy.io.registry

• Added delay_doc_updates contextmanager to postpone the formatting of the documentation for the read and write methods of the class to optionally reduce the import time. [#5275]

astropy.modeling

• Added a class to combine astropy fitters and functions to remove outliers e. g., sigma clip. [#4760]

• Added a Tabular model. [#5105]

• Added Hermite1D and Hermite2D polynomial models [#5242]

• Added the injection of EntryPoints into astropy.modeling.fitting if they inherit from Fitters class. [#5241]

• Added bounding box to Lorentz1D and MexicanHat1D models. [#5393]

• Added Planar2D functional model. [#5456]

• Updated Gaussian2D to accept no arguments (will use default x/y_stddev and theta). [#5537]

astropy.nddata

• Added keep and **kwargs parameter to support_nddata. [#5477]

astropy.stats

• Added axis keyword to biweight_location and biweight_midvariance. [#5127, #5158]

astropy.table

• Allow renaming mixin columns. [#5469]

• Support generalized value formatting for mixin columns in tables. [#5274]

• Support persistence of table indices when pickling and copying table. [#5468]

astropy.tests

• Install both runtime and test dependencies when running the ./setup.py test command. These dependencies are specified by the install_requires and tests_require keywords via setuptools. [#5092]

• Enable easier subclassing of the TestRunner class. [#5505]

astropy.time

• light_travel_time can now use more accurate JPL ephemerides. [#5273, #5436]

astropy.units

• Added pixel_scale and plate_scale equivalencies. [#4987]

• The spectral_density equivalency now supports transformations of luminosity density. [#5151]

• Quantity now accepts strings consisting of a number and unit such as ‘10 km/s’. [#5245]

astropy.utils

• Added a new decorator: deprecated_renamed_argument. This can be used to rename a function argument, while it still allows for the use of the older argument name. [#5214]

astropy.visualization

• Added a make_lupton_rgb function to generate color images from three greyscale images, following the algorithm of Lupton et al. (2004). [#5535]

• Added data and interval inputs to the ImageNormalize class. [#5206]

• Added a new simple_norm convenience function. [#5206]

• Added a default stretch for the Normalization class. [#5206].

• Added a default vmin/vmax for the ManualInterval class. [#5206].

• The wcsaxes subpackage has now been integrated in astropy as astropy.visualization.wcsaxes. This allows plotting of astronomical data/coordinate systems in Matplotlib. [#5496]

astropy.wcs

• Improved footprint_to_file: allow to specify the coordinate system, and use by default the one from RADESYS. Overwrite the file instead of appending to it. [#5494]

API Changes

astropy.convolution

• discretize_model now raises an exception if non-integer ranges are used. Previously it had incorrect behavior but did not raise an exception. [#5538]

astropy.coordinates

• SkyCoord, ICRS, and other coordinate objects, as well as the underlying representations such as SphericalRepresentation and CartesianRepresentation can now be reshaped using methods named like the numpy ones for ndarray (reshape, swapaxes, etc.) [#4123, #5254, #5482]

• The obsgeoloc and obsgeovel attributes of GCRS and PrecessedGeocentric frames are now stored and returned as CartesianRepresentation objects, rather than Quantity objects. Similarly, EarthLocation.get_gcrs_posvel now returns a tuple of CartesianRepresentation objects. [#5253]

• search_around_3d and search_around_sky now return units for the distance matching their input argument when no match is found, instead of dimensionless_unscaled. [#5528]

astropy.io.ascii

• ASCII writers now accept an ‘overwrite’ argument. The default behavior is changed so that a warning will be issued when overwriting an existing file unless overwrite=True. In a future version this will be changed from a warning to an exception to prevent accidentally overwriting a file. [#5007]

• The default representation of masked values when writing tables was changed from '--' to the empty string ''. Previously any user-supplied fill_values parameter would overwrite the class default, but now the values are prepended to the class default. [#5347]

astropy.io.fits

• The old Header interface, deprecated since Astropy 0.1 (PyFITS 3.1), has been removed entirely. See Header Interface Transition Guide for explanations on this change and help on the transition. [#5310]

• The following functions, classes and methods have been removed: CardList, Card.key, Card.cardimage, Card.ascardimage, create_card, create_card_from_string, upper_key, Header.ascard, Header.rename_key, Header.get_history, Header.get_comment, Header.toTxtFile, Header.fromTxtFile, new_table, tdump, tcreate, BinTableHDU.tdump, BinTableHDU.tcreate.

• Removed txtfile argument to the Header constructor.

• Removed usage of Header.update with Header.update(keyword, value, comment) arguments.

• Removed startColumn and endColumn arguments to the FITS_record constructor.

• The clobber argument in FITS writers has been renamed to overwrite. This change affects the following functions and methods: tabledump, writeto, Header.tofile, Header.totextfile, _BaseDiff.report, _BaseHDU.overwrite, BinTableHDU.dump and HDUList.writeto. [#5171]

• Added an optional copy parameter to fits.Header which controls if a copy is made when creating an Header from another Header. [#5005, #5326]

astropy.io.registry

• .fts and .fts.gz files will be automatically identified as io.fits files if no explicit format is given. [#5211]

• Added an optional readwrite parameter for get_formats to filter formats for read or write. [#5275]

astropy.modeling

• Gaussian2D now raises an error if theta is set at the same time as cov_matrix (previously theta was silently ignored). [#5537]

astropy.table

• Setting an existing table column (e.g. t['a'] = [1, 2, 3]) now defaults to replacing the column with a column corresponding to the new value (using t.replace_column()) instead of doing an in-place update. Any existing meta-data in the column (e.g. the unit) is discarded. An in-place update is still done when the new value is not a valid column, e.g. t['a'] = 0. To force an in-place update use the pattern t['a'][:] = [1, 2, 3]. [#5556]

• Allow collections.Mapping-like data attribute when initializing a Table object (dict-like was already possible). [#5213]

astropy.tests

• The inputs to the TestRunner.run_tests() method now must be keyword arguments (no positional arguments). This applies to the astropy.test() function as well. [#5505]

astropy.utils

• Renamed ignored context manager in compat.misc to suppress to be consistent with https://bugs.python.org/issue19266 . [#5003]

astropy.visualization

• Deprecated the scale_image function. [#5206]

• The mpl_normalize module (containing the ImageNormalize class) is now automatically imported with the visualization subpackage. [#5491]

astropy.vo

• The clobber argument in VOSDatabase.to_json() has been renamed to overwrite. [#5171]

astropy.wcs

• wcs.rotateCD() was deprecated without a replacement. [#5240]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Transformations between CIRS and AltAz now correctly account for the location of the observer. [#5591]

• GCRS frames representing a location on Earth with multiple obstimes are now allowed. This means that the solar system routines get_body, get_moon and get_sun now work with non-scalar times and a non-geocentric observer. [#5253]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix issue with units or other astropy core classes stored in table meta. [#5605]

astropy.io.fits

• Copying a fits.Header using copy or deepcopy from the copy module will use Header.copy to ensure that modifying the copy will not alter the other original Header and vice-versa. [#4990, #5323]

• HDUList.info() no longer raises AttributeError in presence of BZERO. [#5508]

• Avoid exceptions with numpy 1.10 and up when using scaled integer data where BZERO has float type but integer value. [#4639, #5527]

• Converting a header card to a string now calls self.verify('fix+warn') instead of self.verify('fix') so headers with invalid keywords will not raise a VerifyError on printing. [#887,#5054]

• FITS_Record._convert_ascii now converts blank fields to 0 when a non-blank null column value is set. [#5134, #5394]

astropy.io.registry

• read now correctly raises an IOError if a file with an unknown extension can’t be found, instead of raising IORegistryError: “Format could not be identified.” [#4779]

astropy.time

• Ensure Time instances holding a single delta_ut1_utc can be copied, flattened, etc. [#5225]

astropy.units

• Operations involving Angle or Distance, or any other SpecificTypeQuantity instance, now also keep return an instance of the same type if the instance was the second argument (if the resulting unit is consistent with the specific type). [#5327]

• Inplace operations on Angle and Distance instances now raise an exception if the final unit is not equivalent to radian and meter, resp. Similarly, views as Angle and Distance can now only be taken from quantities with appropriate units, and views as Quantity can only be taken from logarithmic quanties such as Magnitude if the physical unit is dimensionless. [#5070]

• Conversion from quantities to logarithmic units now correctly causes a logarithmic quantity such as Magnitude to be returned. [#5183]

astropy.wcs

• SIP distortion for an alternate WCS is correctly initialized now by looking at the “CTYPE” values matching the alternate WCS. [#5443]

Other Changes and Additions

• The bundled ERFA was updated to version 1.3.0. This includes the leap second planned for 2016 Dec 31.

astropy.coordinates

• Initialization of Angle has been sped up for Quantity and Angle input. [#4970]

• The use of np.matrix instances in the transformations has been deprecated, since this class does not allow stacks of matrices. As a result, the semi-public functions angles.rotation_matrix and angles.angle_axis are also deprecated, in favour of the new routines with the same name in coordinates.matrix_utilities. [#5104]

• A new BaseCoordinateFrame.cache dictionary has been created to expose the internal cache. This is useful when modifying representation data in-place without using realize_frame. Additionally, documentation for in-place operations on coordinates were added. [#5575]

• Coordinates and their representations are printed with a slightly different format, following how numpy >= 1.12 prints structured arrays. [#5423]

astropy.cosmology

• The default cosmological model has been changed to Planck 2015, and the citation strings have been updated. [#5372]

astropy.extern

• Updated the bundled six module to version 1.10.0. [#5521]

• Updated the astropy shipped version of PLY to version 3.9. [#5526]

• Updated the astropy shipped version of jQuery to v3.3.1, and dataTables to v1.10.12. [#5564]

astropy.io.fits

• Performance improvements for tables with many columns. [#4985]

• Removed obsolete code that was previously needed to properly implement the append mode. [#4793]

astropy.io.registry

• Reduced the time spent in the get_formats function. This also reduces the time it takes to import astropy subpackages, i.e. astropy.coordinates. [#5262]

astropy.units

• The functions add_enabled_units, set_enabled_equivalencies and add_enabled_equivalencies have been sped up by copying the current _UnitRegistry instead of building it from scratch. [#5306]

• To build the documentation, the build_sphinx command has been deprecated in favor of build_docs. [#5179]

• The --remote-data option to python setup.py test can now take different arguments: --remote-data=none is the same as not specifying --remote-data (skip all tests that require the internet), --remote-data=astropy skips all tests that need remote data except those that require only data from data.astropy.org, and --remote-data=any is the same as --remote-data (run all tests that use remote data). [#5506]

• The pytest recwarn fixture has been removed from the tests in favor of utils.catch_warnings. [#5489]

• Deprecated escape sequences in strings (Python 3.6) have been removed. [#5489]

Version 1.2.2 (2016-12-22)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a bug where the fill_values parameter was ignored when writing a table to HTML format. [#5379]

astropy.io.fits

• Handle unicode FITS BinTable column names on Python 2 [#5204, #4805]

• Fix reading of float values from ASCII tables, that could be read as float32 instead of float64 (with the E and F formats). These values are now always read as float64. [#5362]

• Fixed memoryleak when using the compression module. [#5399, #5464]

• Able to insert and remove lower case HIERARCH keywords in a consistent manner [#5313, #5321]

astropy.stats

• Fixed broadcasting in sigma_clip when using negative axis. [#4988]

astropy.table

• Assigning a logarithmic unit to a QTable column that did not have a unit yet now correctly turns it into the appropriate function quantity subclass (such as Magnitude or Dex). [#5345]

• Fix default value for show_row_index in Table.show_in_browser. [#5562]

astropy.units

• For inverse trig functions that operate on quantities, catch any warnings that occur from evaluating the function on the unscaled quantity value between __array_prepare__ and __array_wrap__. [#5153]

• Ensure != also works for function units such as MagUnit [#5345]

astropy.wcs

• Fix use of the relax keyword in to_header when used to change the output precision. [#5164]

• wcs.to_header(relax=True) adds a “-SIP” suffix to CTYPE when SIP distortion is present in the WCS object. [#5239]

• Improved log messages in to_header. [#5239]

Other Changes and Additions

• The bundled ERFA was updated to version 1.3.0. This includes the leap second planned for 2016 Dec 31.

astropy.stats

• poisson_conf_interval with 'kraft-burrows-nousek' interval is now faster and usable with SciPy versions < 0.14. [#5064, #5290]

Version 1.2.1 (2016-06-22)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed a bug that caused TFIELDS to not be in the correct position in compressed image HDU headers under certain circumstances, which created invalid FITS files. [#5118, #5125]

astropy.units

• Fixed an ImportError that occurred whenever astropy.constants was imported before astropy.units. [#5030, #5121]

• Magnitude zero points used to define STmag, ABmag, M_bol and m_bol are now collected in astropy.units.magnitude_zero_points. They are not enabled as regular units by default, but can be included using astropy.units.magnitude_zero_points.enable(). This makes it possible to round-trip magnitudes as originally intended. [#5030]

Version 1.2 (2016-06-19)

General

• Astropy now requires Numpy 1.7.0 or later. [#4784]

New Features

astropy.constants

• Add L_bol0, the luminosity corresponding to absolute bolometric magnitude zero. [#4262]

astropy.coordinates

• CartesianRepresentation now includes a transform() method that can take a 3x3 matrix to transform coordinates. [#4860]

• Solar system and lunar ephemerides accessible via get_body, get_body_barycentric and get_moon functions. [#4890]

• Added astrometric frames (i.e., a frame centered on a particular point/object specified in another frame). [#4909, #4941]

• Added SkyCoord.spherical_offsets_to method. [#4338]

• Recent Earth rotation (IERS) data are now auto-downloaded so that AltAz transformations for future dates now use the most accurate available rotation values. [#4436]

• Add support for heliocentric coordinate frames. [#4314]

astropy.cosmology

• angular_diameter_distance_z1z2 now supports the computation of the angular diameter distance between a scalar and an array like argument. [#4593] The method now supports models with negative Omega_k0 (positive curvature universes) [#4661] and allows z2 < z1.

astropy.io.ascii

• File name could be passed as Path object. [#4606]

• Check that columns in formats specifier exist in the output table when writing. [#4508, #4511]

• Allow trailing whitespace in the IPAC header lines. [#4758]

• Updated to filter out the default parser warning of BeautifulSoup. [#4551]

• Added support for reading and writing reStructuredText simple tables. [#4812]

astropy.io.fits

• File name could be passed as Path object. [#4606]

• Header allows a dictionary-like cards argument during creation. [#4663]

• New function convenience.table_to_hdu to allow creating a FITS HDU object directly from an astropy Table. [#4778]

• New optional arguments ignore_missing and remove_all are added to astropy.io.fits.header.remove(). [#5020]

astropy.io.registry

• Added custom IORegistryError. [#4833]

astropy.io.votable

• File name could be passed as Path object. [#4606]

astropy.modeling

• Added the fittable=True attribute to the Scale and Shift models with tests. [#4718]

• Added example plots to docstrings for some built-in models. [#4008]

astropy.nddata

• UnknownUncertainty new subclass of NDUncertainty that can be used to save uncertainties that cannot be used for error propagation. [#4272]

• NDArithmeticMixin: add, subtract, multiply and divide can be used as classmethods but require that two operands are given. These operands don’t need to be NDData instances but they must be convertible to NDData. This conversion is done internally. Using it on the instance does not require (but also allows) two operands. [#4272, #4851]

• NDDataRef new subclass that implements NDData together with all currently available mixins. This class does not implement additional attributes, methods or a numpy.ndarray-like interface like NDDataArray. attributes, methods or a numpy.ndarray-like interface like NDDataArray. [#4797]

astropy.stats

• Added axis keyword for mad_std function. [#4688, #4689]

• Added Bayesian and Akaike Information Criteria. [#4716]

• Added Bayesian upper limits for Poisson count rates. [#4622]

• Added circstats; a module for computing circular statistics. [#3705, #4472]

• Added jackknife resampling method. [#3708, #4439]

• Updated bootstrap to allow bootstrapping statistics with multiple outputs. [#3601]

• Added LombScargle class to compute Lomb-Scargle periodograms [#4811]

astropy.table

• Table.show_in_notebook and Table.show_in_browser(jsviewer=True) now yield tables with an “idx” column, allowing easy identification of the index of a row even when the table is re-sorted in the browser. [#4404]

• Added AttributeError when trying to set mask on non-masked table. [#4637]

• Allow to use a tuple of keys in Table.sort. [#4671]

• Added itercols; a way to iterate through columns of a table. [#3805, #4888]

• Table.show_in_notebook and the default notebook display (i.e., Table._repr_html_) now use consistent table styles which can be set using the astropy.table.default_notebook_table_class configuration item. [#4886]

• Added interface to create Table directly from any table-like object that has an __astropy_table__ method. [#4885]

astropy.tests

• Enable test runner to obtain documentation source files from directory other than “docs”. [#4748]

astropy.time

• Added caching of scale and format transformations for improved performance. [#4422]

• Recent Earth rotation (IERS) data are now auto-downloaded so that UT1 transformations for future times now work out of the box. [#4436]

• Add support for barycentric/heliocentric time corrections. [#4314]

astropy.units

• The option to use tuples to indicate fractional powers of units, deprecated in 0.3.1, has been removed. [#4449]

• Added slug to imperial units. [#4670]

• Added Earth radius (R_earth) and Jupiter radius (R_jup) to units. [#4818]

• Added a represents property to allow access to the definition of a named unit (e.g., u.kpc.represents yields 1000 pc). [#4806]

• Add bolometric absolute and apparent magnitudes, M_bol and m_bol. [#4262]

astropy.utils

• Path object could be passed to get_readable_fileobj. [#4606]

• Implemented a generic and extensible way of merging metadata. [#4459]

• Added format_doc decorator which allows to replace and/or format the current docstring of an object. [#4242]

• Added a new context manager set_locale to temporarily set the current locale. [#4363]

• Added new IERS_Auto class to auto-download recent IERS (Earth rotation) data when required by coordinate or time transformations. [#4436]

astropy.visualization

• Add zscale interval based on Numdisplay’s implementation. [#4776]

API changes

astropy.config

• The deprecated ConfigurationItem and ConfigAlias classes and the save_config, get_config_items, and generate_all_config_items functions have now been removed. [#2767, #4446]

astropy.coordinates

• Removed compatibility layer for pre-v0.4 API. [#4447]

• Added copy keyword-only argument to allow initialization without copying the (possibly large) input coordinate arrays. [#4883]

astropy.cosmology

• Improve documentation of z validity range of cosmology objects [#4882, #4949]

astropy.io.ascii

• Add a way to control HTML escaping when writing a table as an HTML file. [#4423]

astropy.io.fits

• Two optional boolean arguments ignore_missing and remove_all are added to Header.remove. [#5020]

astropy.modeling

• Renamed Redshift model to RedshiftScaleFactor. [#3672]

• Inputs (coords and out) to render function in Model are converted to float. [#4697]

• RotateNative2Celestial and RotateCelestial2Native are now implemented as subclasses of EulerAngleRotation. [#4881, #4940]

astropy.nddata

• NDDataBase does not set the private uncertainty property anymore. This only affects you if you subclass NDDataBase directly. [#4270]

• NDDataBase: the uncertainty-setter is removed. A similar one is added in NDData so this also only affects you if you subclassed NDDataBase directly. [#4270]

• NDDataBase: uncertainty-getter returns None instead of the private uncertainty and is now abstract. This getter is moved to NDData so it only affects direct subclasses of NDDataBase. [#4270]

• NDData accepts a Quantity-like data and an explicitly given unit. Before a ValueError was raised in this case. The final instance will use the explicitly given unit-attribute but doesn’t check if the units are convertible and the data will not be scaled. [#4270]

• NDData : the given mask, explicit or implicit if the data was masked, will be saved by the setter. It will not be saved directly as the private attribute. [#4879]

• NDData accepts an additional argument copy which will copy every parameter before it is saved as attribute of the instance. [#4270]

• NDData: added an uncertainty.getter that returns the private attribute. It is equivalent to the old NDDataBase.uncertainty-getter. [#4270]

• NDData: added an uncertainty.setter. It is slightly modified with respect to the old NDDataBase.uncertainty-setter. The changes include:

• if the uncertainty has no uncertainty_type an info message is printed instead of a TypeError and the uncertainty is saved as UnknownUncertainty except the uncertainty is None. [#4270]

• the requirement that the uncertainty_type of the uncertainty needs to be a string was removed. [#4270]

• if the uncertainty is a subclass of NDUncertainty the parent_nddata attribute will be set so the uncertainty knows to which data it belongs. This is also a Bugfix. [#4152, #4270]

• NDData: added a meta-getter, which will set and return an empty OrderedDict if no meta was previously set. [#4509, #4469]

• NDData: added an meta-setter. It requires that the meta is dictionary-like (it also accepts Headers or ordered dictionaries and others) or None. [#4509, #4469, #4921]

• NDArithmeticMixin: The operand in arithmetic methods (add, …) doesn’t need to be a subclass of NDData. It is sufficient if it can be converted to one. This conversion is done internally. [#4272]

• NDArithmeticMixin: The arithmetic methods allow several new arguments to control how or if different attributes of the class will be processed during the operation. [#4272]

• NDArithmeticMixin: Giving the parameter propagate_uncertainties as positional keyword is deprecated and will be removed in the future. You now need to specify it as keyword-parameter. Besides True and False also None is now a valid value for this parameter. [#4272, #4851]

• NDArithmeticMixin: The wcs attribute of the operands is not compared and thus raises no ValueError if they differ, except if a compare_wcs parameter is specified. [#4272]

• NDArithmeticMixin: The arithmetic operation was split from a general _arithmetic method to different specialized private methods to allow subclasses more control on how the attributes are processed without overriding _arithmetic. The _arithmetic method is now used to call these other methods. [#4272]

• NDSlicingMixin: If the attempt at slicing the mask, wcs or uncertainty fails with a TypeError a Warning is issued instead of the TypeError. [#4271]

• NDUncertainty: support_correlated attribute is deprecated in favor of supports_correlated which is a property. Also affects StdDevUncertainty. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty: added the __init__ that was previously implemented in StdDevUncertainty and takes an additional unit parameter. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty: added a unit property without setter that returns the set unit or if not set the unit of the parent. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty: included a parent_nddata property similar to the one previously implemented in StdDevUncertainty. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty: added an array property with setter. The setter will convert the value to a plain numpy array if it is a list or a subclass of a numpy array. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty: propagate_multiply and similar were removed. Before they were abstract properties and replaced by methods with the same name but with a leading underscore. The entry point for propagation is a method called propagate. [#4272]

• NDUncertainty and subclasses: implement a representation (__repr__). [#4787]

• StdDevUncertainty: error propagation allows an explicitly given correlation factor, which may be a scalar or an array which will be taken into account during propagation. This correlation must be determined manually and is not done by the uncertainty! [#4272]

• StdDevUncertainty: the array is converted to a plain numpy array only if it’s a list or a subclass of numpy.ndarray. Previously it was always cast to a numpy array but also allowed subclasses. [#4272]

• StdDevUncertainty: setting the parent_nddata does not compare if the shape of it’s array is identical to the parents data shape. [#4272]

• StdDevUncertainty: the array.setter doesn’t compare if the array has the same shape as the parents data. [#4272]

• StdDevUncertainty: deprecated support_correlated in favor of supports_correlated. [#4272, #4828]

• StdDevUncertainty: deprecated propagate_add and similar methods in favor of propagate. [#4272, #4828]

• Allow data to be a named argument in NDDataArray. [#4626]

astropy.table

• operations.unique now has a keep parameter, which allows one to select whether to keep the first or last row in a set of duplicate rows, or to remove all rows that are duplicates. [#4632]

• QTable now behaves more consistently by making columns act as a Quantity even if they are assigned a unit after the table is created. [#4497, #4884]

astropy.units

• Remove deprecated register argument for Unit classes. [#4448]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.compat.argparse module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘argparse’ module directly instead. [#4462]

• The astropy.utils.compat.odict module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘collections’ module directly instead. [#4466]

• The astropy.utils.compat.gzip module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘gzip’ module directly instead. [#4464]

• The deprecated ScienceStateAlias class has been removed. [#2767, #4446]

• The astropy.utils.compat.subprocess module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘subprocess’ module instead. [#4483]

• The astropy.utils.xml.unescaper module now also unescapes '%2F' to '/' and '&&' to '&' in a given URL. [#4699]

• The astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData descriptor has now two optional parameters: doc and copy. [#4921]

• The default IERS (Earth rotation) data now is now auto-downloaded via a new class IERS_Auto. When extrapolating UT1-UTC or polar motion values outside the available time range, the values are now clipped at the last available value instead of being linearly extrapolated. [#4436]

astropy.wcs

• WCS objects can now be initialized with an ImageHDU or PrimaryHDU object. [#4493, #4505]

• astropy.wcs now issues an INFO message when the header has SIP coefficients but “-SIP” is missing from CTYPE. [#4814]

Bug fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Ameliorate a problem with get_sun not round-tripping due to approximations in the light deflection calculation. [#4952]

• Ensure that angle_utilities.position_angle accepts floats, as stated in the docstring. [#3800]

• Ensured that transformations for GCRS frames are correct for non-geocentric observers. [#4986]

• Fixed a problem with the Quantity._repr_latex_ method causing errors when showing an EarthLocation in a Jupyter notebook. [#4542, #5068]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a problem where the fast reader (with use_fast_converter=False) can fail on non-US locales. [#4363]

• Fix astropy.io.ascii.read handling of units for IPAC formatted files. Columns with no unit are treated as unitless not dimensionless. [#4867, #4947]

• Fix problems the header parsing in the sextractor reader. [#4603, #4910]

astropy.io.fits

• GroupsHDU.is_image property is now set to False. [#4742]

• Ensure scaling keywords are removed from header when unsigned integer data is converted to signed type. [#4974, #5053]

• Made TFORMx keyword check more flexible in test of compressed images to enable compatibility of the test with cfitsio 3.380. [#4646, #4653]

astropy.io.votable

• The astropy.io.votable.validator.html module is updated to handle division by zero when generating validation report. [#4699]

• KeyError when converting Table v1.2 numeric arrays fixed. [#4782]

astropy.modeling

• Refactored AiryDisk2D, Sersic1D, and Sersic2D models to be able to combine them as classes as well as instances. [#4720]

• Modified the “LevMarLSQFitter” class to use the weights in the calculation of the Jacobian. [#4751]

astropy.nddata

• NDData giving masked_Quantities as data-argument will use the implicitly passed mask, unit and value. [#4270]

• NDData using a subclass implementing NDData with NDArithmeticMixin now allows error propagation. [#4270]

• Fixed memory leak that happened when uncertainty of NDDataArray was set. [#4825, #4862]

• StdDevUncertainty: During error propagation the unit of the uncertainty is taken into account. [#4272]

• NDArithmeticMixin: divide and multiply yield correct uncertainties if only one uncertainty is set. [#4152, #4272]

astropy.stats

• Fix sigma_clipped_stats to use the axis argument. [#4726, #4808]

astropy.table

• Fixed bug where Tables created from existing Table objects were not inheriting the primary_key attribute. [#4672, #4930]

• Provide more detail in the error message when reading a table fails due to a problem converting column string values. [#4759]

astropy.units

• Exponentiation using a Quantity with a unit equivalent to dimensionless as base and an array-like exponent yields the correct result. [#4770]

• Ensured that with spectral_density equivalency one could also convert between photlam and STmag/ABmag. [#5017]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.compat.fractions module has now been deprecated. Use the Python ‘fractions’ module directly instead. [#4463]

• Added format_doc decorator which allows to replace and/or format the current docstring of an object. [#4242]

• Attributes using the astropy.utils.metadata.MetaData descriptor are now included in the sphinx documentation. [#4921]

astropy.vo

• Relaxed expected accuracy of Cone Search prediction test to reduce spurious failures. [#4382]

astropy.wcs

• astropy.wcs.to_header removes “-SIP” from CTYPE when SIP coefficients are not written out, i.e. relax is either False or None. astropy.wcs.to_header appends “-SIP” to CTYPE when SIP coefficients are written out, i.e. relax=True. [#4814]

• Made wcs.bounds_check call wcsprm_python2c, which means it works even if wcs.set has not been called yet. [#4957, #4966].

• WCS objects can no longer be reverse-indexed, which was technically permitted but incorrectly implemented previously [#4962]

Other Changes and Additions

• Python 2.6 is no longer supported. [#4486]

• The bundled version of py.test has been updated to 2.8.3. [#4349]

• Reduce Astropy’s import time (import astropy) by almost a factor 2. [#4649]

• Cython prerequisite for building changed to v0.19 in install.rst [#4705, #4710, #4719]

• All astropy.modeling functionality that was deprecated in Astropy 1.0 has been removed. [#4857]

• Added instructions for installing Astropy into CASA. [#4840]

• Added an example gallery to the docs demonstrating short snippets/examples. [#4734]

Version 1.1.2 (2016-03-10)

New Features

astropy.wcs

• The astropy.wcs module now exposes WCSHDO_P* constants that can be used to allow more control over output precision when using the relax keyword argument. [#4616]

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed handling of CDS data file when no description is given and also included stripping out of markup for missing value from description. [#4437, #4474]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed possible segfault during error handling in FITS tile compression. [#4489]

• Fixed crash on pickling of binary table columns with the ‘X’, ‘P’, or ‘Q’ format. [#4514]

• Fixed memory / reference leak that could occur when copying a FITS_rec object (the .data for table HDUs). [#520]

• Fixed a memory / reference leak in FITS_rec that occurred in a wide range of cases, especially after writing FITS tables to a file, but in other cases as well. [#4539]

astropy.modeling

• Fix a bug to allow instantiation of a modeling class having a parameter with a custom setter that takes two parameters (value, model) [#4656]

astropy.table

• Fixed bug when replacing a table column with a mixin column like Quantity or Time. [#4601]

• Disable initial ordering in jsviewer (show_in_browser, show_in_notebook) to respect the order from the Table. [#4628]

astropy.units

• Fixed sphinx issues on plotting quantities. [#4527]

astropy.utils

• Fixed latex representation of function units. [#4563]

• The zest.releaser hooks included in Astropy are now injected locally to Astropy, rather than being global. [#4650]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed fits2bitmap script to allow ext flag to contain extension names or numbers. [#4468]

• Fixed fits2bitmap default output filename generation for compressed FITS files. [#4468]

• Fixed quantity_support to ensure its conversion returns ndarray instances (needed for numpy >=1.10). [#4654]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed possible exception in handling of SIP headers that was introduced in v1.1.1. [#4492]

• Fixed a bug that caused WCS objects with a high dynamic range of values for certain parameters to lose precision when converted to a header. This occurred for example in cases of spectral cubes, where a spectral axis in Hz might have a CRVAL3 value greater than 1e10 but the spatial coordinates would have CRVAL1/2 values 8 to 10 orders of magnitude smaller. This bug was present in Astropy 1.1 and 1.1.1 but not 1.0.x. This has now been fixed by ensuring that all WCS keywords are output with 14 significant figures by default. [#4616]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers to v1.1.2. [#4678]

• Updated bundled copy of WCSLIB to 5.14. [#4579]

Version 1.1.1 (2016-01-08)

New Features

astropy.io.registry

• Allow pathlib.Path objects (available in Python 3.4 and later) for specifying the file name in registry read / write functions. [#4405]

astropy.utils

• console.human_file_size now accepts quantities with byte-equivalent units [#4373]

Bug Fixes

astropy.analytic_functions

• Fixed the blackbody functions’ handling of overflows on some platforms (Windows with MSVC, older Linux versions) with a buggy expm1 function. [#4393]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed an bug where updates to string columns in FITS tables were not saved on Python 3. [#4452]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers to v1.1.1. [#4413]

Version 1.1 (2015-12-11)

New Features

astropy.config

• Added new tools set_temp_config and set_temp_cache which can be used either as function decorators or context managers to temporarily use alternative directories in which to read/write the Astropy config files and download caches respectively. This is especially useful for testing, though set_temp_cache may also be used as a way to provide an alternative (application specific) download cache for large data files, rather than relying on the default cache location in users’ home directories. [#3975]

astropy.constants

• Added the Thomson scattering cross-section. [#3839]

astropy.convolution

• Added Moffat2DKernel. [#3965]

astropy.coordinates

• Added get_constellation function and SkyCoord.get_constellation convenience method to determine the constellation that a coordinate is in. [#3758]

• Added PrecessedGeocentric frame, which is based on GCRS, but precessed to a specific requested mean equinox. [#3758]

• Added Supergalactic frame to support de Vaucouleurs supergalactic coordinates. [#3892]

• SphericalRepresentation now has a ._unit_representation class attribute to specify an equivalent UnitSphericalRepresentation. This allows subclasses of representations to pair up correctly. [#3757]

• Added functionality to support getting the locations of observatories by name. See astropy.coordinates.EarthLocation.of_site. [#4042]

• Added ecliptic coordinates, including GeocentricTrueEcliptic, BarycentricTrueEcliptic, and HeliocentricTrueEcliptic. [#3749]

astropy.cosmology

• Add Planck 2015 cosmology [#3476]

• Distance calculations now > 20-40x faster for the supplied cosmologies due to implementing Cython scalar versions of FLRW.inv_efunc.[#4127]

astropy.io.ascii

• Automatically use guess=False when reading if the file format is provided and the format parameters are uniquely specified. This update also removes duplicate format guesses to improve performance. [#3418]

• Calls to ascii.read() for fixed-width tables may now omit one of the keyword arguments col_starts or col_ends. Columns will be assumed to begin and end immediately adjacent to each other. [#3657]

• Add a function get_read_trace() that returns a traceback of the attempted read formats for the last call to astropy.io.ascii.read. [#3688]

• Supports LZMA decompression via get_readable_fileobj [#3667]

• Allow - character is Sextractor format column names. [#4168]

• Improve DAOphot reader to read multi-aperture files [#3535, #4207]

astropy.io.fits

• Support reading and writing from bzip2 compressed files. i.e. .fits.bz2 files. [#3789]

• Included a new command-line script called fitsinfo to display a summary of the HDUs in one or more FITS files. [#3677]

astropy.io.misc

• Support saving all meta information, description and units of tables and columns in HDF5 files [#4103]

astropy.io.votable

• A new method was added to astropy.io.votable.VOTable, get_info_by_id to conveniently find an INFO element by its ID attribute. [#3633]

• Instances in the votable tree now have better __repr__ methods. [#3639]

astropy.logger.py

• Added log levels (e.g., DEBUG, INFO, CRITICAL) to astropy.log [#3947]

astropy.modeling

• Added a new Parameter.validator interface for setting a validation method on individual model parameters. See the Parameter documentation for more details. [#3910]

• The projection classes that are named based on the 3-letter FITS WCS projections (e.g. Pix2Sky_TAN) now have aliases using longer, more descriptive names (e.g. Pix2Sky_Gnomonic). [#3583]

• All of the standard FITS WCS projection types have been implemented in astropy.modeling.projections (by wrapping WCSLIB). [#3906]

• Added Sersic1D and Sersic2D model classes. [#3889]

• Added the Voigt profile to existing models. [#3901]

• Added bounding_box property and render_model function [#3909]

astropy.nddata

• Added block_reduce and block_replicate functions. [#3453]

• extract_array now offers different options to deal with array boundaries [#3727]

• Added a new Cutout2D class to create postage stamp image cutouts with optional WCS propagation. [#3823]

astropy.stats

• Added sigma_lower and sigma_upper keywords to sigma_clip to allow for non-symmetric clipping. [#3595]

• Added cenfunc, stdfunc, and axis keywords to sigma_clipped_stats. [#3792]

• sigma_clip automatically masks invalid input values (NaNs, Infs) before performing the clipping [#4051]

• Added the histogram routine, which is similar to np.histogram but includes several additional options for automatic determination of optimal histogram bins. Associated helper routines include bayesian_blocks, friedman_bin_width, scott_bin_width, and knuth_bin_width. This functionality was ported from the astroML library. [#3756]

• Added the bayesian_blocks routine, which implements a dynamic algorithm for locating change-points in various time series. [#3756]

• A new function poisson_conf_interval() was added to allow easy calculation of several standard formulae for the error bars on the mean of a Poisson variable estimated from a single sample.

astropy.table

• add_column() and add_columns() now have rename_duplicate option to rename new column(s) rather than raise exception when its name already exists. [#3592]

• Added Table.to_pandas and Table.from_pandas for converting to/from pandas dataframes. [#3504]

• Initializing a Table with Column objects no longer requires that the column name attribute be defined. [#3781]

• Added an info property to Table objects which provides configurable summary information about the table and its columns. [#3731]

• Added an info property to column classes (Column or mixins). This serves a dual function of providing configurable summary information about the column, and acting as a manager of column attributes such as name, format, or description. [#3731]

• Updated table and column representation to use the dtype_info_name function for the dtype value. Removed the default “masked=False” from the table representation. [#3868, #3869]

• Updated row representation to be consistent with the corresponding table representation for that row. Added HTML representation so a row displays nicely in IPython notebook.

• Added a new table indexing engine allowing for the creation of indices on one or more columns of a table using add_index. These indices enable new functionality such as searching for rows by value using loc and iloc, as well as increased performance for certain operations. [#3915, #4202]

• Added capability to include a structured array or recarray in a table as a mixin column. This allows for an approximation of nested tables. [#3925]

• Added keep_byteorder option to Table.as_array(). See the “API Changes” section below. [#4080]

• Added a new method Table.replace_column() to replace an existing column with a new data column. [#4090]

• Added a tableclass option to Table.pformat() to allow specifying a list of CSS classes added to the HTML table. [#4131]

• New CSS for jsviewer table [#2917, #2982, #4174]

• Added a new Table.show_in_notebook method that shows an interactive view of a Table (similar to Table.show_in_browser(jsviewer=True)) in an Python/Jupyter notebook. [#4197]

• Added column alignment formatting for better pprint viewing experience. [#3644]

astropy.tests

• Added new test config options, config_dir and cache_dir (these can be edited in setup.cfg or as extra command-line options to py.test) for setting the locations to use for the Astropy config files and download caches (see also the related set_temp_config/cache features added in astropy.config). [#3975]

astropy.time

• Add support for FITS standard time strings. [#3547]

• Allow the format attribute to be updated in place to change the default representation of a Time object. [#3673]

• Add support for shape manipulation (reshape, ravel, etc.). [#3224]

• Add argmin, argmax, argsort, min, max, ptp, sort methods. [#3681]

• Add Time.to_datetime method for converting Time objects to timezone-aware datetimes. [#4119, #4124]

astropy.units

• Added furlong to imperial units. [#3529]

• Added mil to imperial units. [#3716]

• Added stone to imperial units. [#4192]

• Added Earth Mass (M_earth) and Jupiter mass (M_jup) to units [#3907]

• Added support for functional units, in particular the logarithmic ones Magnitude, Decibel, and Dex. [#1894]

• Quantities now work with the unit support in matplotlib. See Plotting quantities. [#3981]

• Clarified imperial mass measurements and added pound force (lbf), kilopound (kip), and pound per square inch (psi). [#3409]

astropy.utils

• Added new OrderedDescriptor and OrderedDescriptorContainer utility classes that make it easier to implement classes with declarative APIs, wherein class-level attributes have an inherit “ordering” to them that is specified by the order in which those attributes are defined in the class declaration (by defining them using special descriptors that have OrderedDescriptor as a base class). See the API documentation for these classes for more details. Coordinate frames and models now use this interface. [#3679]

• The get_pkg_data_* functions now take an optional package argument which allows specifying any package to read package data filenames or content out of, as opposed to only being able to use data from the package that the function is called from. [#4079]

• Added function dtype_info_name to the data_info module to provide the name of a dtype for human-readable informational purposes. [#3868]

• Added classproperty decorator–this is to property as classmethod is to normal instance methods. [#3982]

• iers.open now handles network URLs, as well as local paths. [#3850]

• The astropy.utils.wraps decorator now takes an optional exclude_args argument not shared by the standard library wraps decorator (as it is unique to the Astropy version’s ability of copying the wrapped function’s argument signature). exclude_args allows certain arguments on the wrapped function to be excluded from the signature of the wrapper function. This is particularly useful when wrapping an instance method as a function (to exclude the self argument). [#4017]

• get_readable_fileobj can automatically decompress LZMA (‘.xz’) files using the lzma module of Python 3.3+ or, when available, the backports.lzma package on earlier versions. [#3667]

• The resolve_name utility now accepts any number of additional positional arguments that are automatically dotted together with the first name argument. [#4083]

• Added is_url_in_cache for resolving paths to cached files via URLS and checking if files exist. [#4095]

• Added a step argument to the ProgressBar.map method to give users control over the update frequency of the progress bar. [#4191]

astropy.visualization

• Added a function / context manager quantity_support for enabling seamless plotting of Quantity instances in matplotlib. [#3981]

• Added the hist function, which is similar to plt.hist but includes several additional options for automatic determination of optimal histogram bins. This functionality was ported from the astroML library. [#3756]

astropy.wcs

• The included version of wcslib has been upgraded to 5.10. [#3992, #4239]

  The minimum required version of wcslib in the 4.x series remains 4.24.

  The minimum required version of wcslib in the 5.x series is 5.8. Building astropy against a wcslib 5.x prior to 5.8 will raise an ImportError when astropy.wcs is imported.

  The wcslib changes relevant to astropy are:

• The FITS headers returned by astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header and astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header_string now include values with more precision. This will result in numerical differences in your results if you convert astropy.wcs.WCS objects to FITS headers and use the results.

• astropy.wcs.WCS now recognises the TPV, TPD, TPU, DSS, TNX and ZPX polynomial distortions.

• Added relaxation flags to allow PC0i_0ja, PV0j_0ma, and PS0j_0ma (i.e. with leading zeroes on the index).

• Tidied up error reporting, particularly relating to translating status returns from lower-level functions.

• Changed output formatting of floating point values in to_header.

• Enhanced text representation of WCS objects. [#3604]

• The astropy.tests.helper module is now part of the public API (and has a documentation page). This module was in previous releases of astropy, but was not considered part of the public API until now. [#3890]

• There is a new function astropy.online_help to search the astropy documentation and display the result in a web browser. [#3642]

API changes

astropy.cosmology

• FLRW._tfunc and FLRW._xfunc are marked as deprecated. Users should use the new public interfaces FLRW.lookback_time_integrand and FLRW.abs_distance_integrand instead. [#3767]

astropy.io.ascii

• The default header line processing was made to be consistent with data line processing in that it now ignores blank lines that may have whitespace characters. Any code that explicitly specifies a header_start value for parsing a file with blank lines in the header containing whitespace will need to be updated. [#2654]

astropy.io.fits

• The uint argument to fits.open is now True by default; that is, arrays using the FITS unsigned integer convention will be detected, and read as unsigned integers by default. A new config option for io.fits, enable_uint, can be changed to False to revert to the original behavior of ignoring the uint convention unless it is explicitly requested with uint=True. [#3916]

• The ImageHDU.NumCode and ImageHDU.ImgCode attributes (and same for other classes derived from _ImageBaseHDU) are deprecated. Instead, the astropy.io.fits module-level constants BITPIX2DTYPE and DTYPE2BITPIX can be used. [#3916]

astropy.modeling

• Note: Comparisons of model parameters with array-like values now yields a Numpy boolean array as one would get with normal Numpy array comparison. Previously this returned a scalar True or False, with True only if the comparison was true for all elements compared, which could lead to confusing circumstances. [#3912]

• Using model.inverse = None to reset a model’s inverse to its default is deprecated. In the future this syntax will explicitly make a model not have an inverse (even if it has a default). Instead, use del model.inverse to reset a model’s inverse to its default (if it has a default, otherwise this just deletes any custom inverse that has been assigned to the model and is still equivalent to setting model.inverse = None). [#4236]

• Adds a model.has_user_inverse attribute which indicates whether or not a user has assigned a custom inverse to model.inverse. This is just for informational purposes, for example, for software that introspects model objects. [#4236]

• Renamed the parameters of RotateNative2Celestial and RotateCelestial2Native from phi, theta, psi to lon, lat and lon_pole. [#3578]

• Deprecated the Pix2Sky_AZP.check_mu and Sky2Pix_AZP.check_mu methods (these were obscure “accidentally public” methods that were probably not used by anyone). [#3910]

• Added a phase parameter to the Sine1D model. [#3807]

astropy.stats

• Renamed the sigma_clip sig keyword as sigma. [#3595]

• Changed the sigma_clip varfunc keyword to stdfunc. [#3595]

• Renamed the sigma_clipped_stats mask_val keyword to mask_value. [#3595]

• Changed the default iters keyword value to 5 in both the sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions. [#4067]

astropy.table

• Table.as_array() always returns a structured array with each column in the system’s native byte order. The optional keep_byteorder=True option will keep each column’s data in its original byteorder. [#4080]

• Table.simple_table() now creates tables with int64 and float64 types instead of int32 and float64. [#4114]

• An empty table can now be initialized without a names argument as long as a valid dtype argument (with names embedded) is supplied. [#3977]

astropy.time

• The astropy_time attribute and time format has been removed from the public interface. Existing code that instantiates a new time object using format='astropy_time' can simply omit the format specification. [#3857]

astropy.units

• Single-item Quantity instances with record dtype will now have their isscalar property return True, consistent with behaviour for numpy arrays, where np.void records are considered scalar. [#3899]

• Three changes relating to the FITS unit format [#3993]:

• The FITS unit format will no longer parse an arbitrary number as a scale value. It must be a power of 10 of the form 10^^k, 10^k, 10+k, 10-k and 10(k). [#3993]

• Scales that are powers of 10 can be written out. Previously, any non-1.0 scale was rejected.

• The * character is accepted as a separator between the scale and the units.

• Unit formatter classes now require the parse and to_string methods are now required to be classmethods (and the formatter classes themselves are assumed to be singletons that are not instantiated). As unit formatters are mostly an internal implementation detail this is not likely to affect any users. [#4001]

• CGS E&M units are now defined separately from SI E&M units, and have distinct physical types. [#4255, #4355]

astropy.utils

• All of the get_pkg_data_* functions take an optional package argument as their second positional argument. So any code that previously passed other arguments to these functions as positional arguments might break. Use keyword argument passing instead to mitigate this. [#4079]

• astropy.utils.iers now uses a QTable internally, which means that the numerical columns are stored as Quantity, with full support for units. Furthermore, the ut1_utc method now returns a Quantity instead of a float or an array (as did pm_xy already). [#3223]

• astropy.utils.iers now throws an IERSRangeError, a subclass of IndexError, rather than a raw IndexError. This allows more fine-grained catching of situations where a Time is beyond the range of the loaded IERS tables. [#4302]

astropy.wcs

• When compiled with wcslib 5.9 or later, the FITS headers returned by astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header and astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header_string now include values with more precision. This will result in numerical differences in your results if you convert astropy.wcs.WCS objects to FITS headers and use the results.

• If NAXIS1 or NAXIS2 is not passed with the header object to WCS.calc_footprint, a ValueError is raised. [#3557]

Bug fixes

astropy.constants

• The constants Ry and u are now properly used inside the corresponding units. The latter have changed slightly as a result. [#4229]

astropy.coordinates

• Internally, coordinates now consistently uses the appropriate time scales for using ERFA functions. [#4302]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a segfault in the fast C parser when one of the column headers is empty [#3545].

• Fix several bugs that prevented the fast readers from being used when guessing the file format. Also improved the read trace information to better understand format guessing. [#4115]

• Fix an underlying problem that resulted in an uncaught TypeError exception when reading a CDS-format file with guessing enabled. [#4120]

astropy.modeling

• Simplex fitter now correctly passes additional keywords arguments to the scipy solver. [#3966]

• The keyword acc (for accuracy) is now correctly accepted by Simplex. [#3966]

astropy.units

• The units Ryd and u are no longer hard-coded numbers, but depend on the appropriate values in the constants module. As a result, these units now imply slightly different conversions. [#4229]

Other Changes and Additions

• The ./setup.py test command is now implemented in the astropy.tests module again (previously its implementation had been moved into astropy-helpers). However, that made it difficult to synchronize changes to the Astropy test runner with changes to the ./setup.py test UI. astropy-helpers v1.1 and above will detect this implementation of the test command, when present, and use it instead of the old version that was included in astropy-helpers (most users will not notice any difference as a result of this change). [#4020]

• The repr for Table no longer displays masked=False since tables are not masked by default anyway. [#3869]

• The version of PLY that ships with astropy has been updated to 3.6.

• WCSAxes is now required for doc builds. [#4074]

• The migration guide from pre-v0.4 coordinates has been removed to avoid cluttering the astropy.coordinates documentation with increasingly irrelevant material. To see the migration guide, we recommend you simply look to the archived documentation for previous versions, e.g. https://docs.astropy.org/en/v1.0/coordinates/index.html#migrating-from-pre-v0-4-coordinates [#4203]

• In astropy.coordinates, the transformations between GCRS, CIRS, and ITRS have been adjusted to more logically reflect the order in which they actually apply. This should not affect most coordinate transformations, but may affect code that is especially sensitive to machine precision effects that change when the order in which transformations occur is changed. [#4255]

• Astropy v1.1.0 will be the last release series to officially support Python 2.6. A deprecation warning will now be issued when using Astropy in Python 2.6 (this warning can be disabled through the usual Python warning filtering mechanisms). [#3779]

Version 1.0.13 (2017-05-29)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fix use of quantize level parameter for CompImageHDU. [#6029]

• Prevent crash when a header contains non-ASCII (e.g. UTF-8) characters, to allow fixing the problematic cards. [#6084]

Version 1.0.12 (2017-03-05)

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fixed bug in discretize_integrate_2D in which x and y coordinates where swapped. [#5634]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug where get_transform could sometimes produce confusing errors because of a typo in the input validation. [#5645]

astropy.io.fits

• Guard against extremely unlikely problems in compressed images, which could lead to memory unmapping errors. [#5775]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed a bug where stdlib realloc() was used instead of PyMem_Realloc() [#5696, #4739, #2100]

astropy.utils

• Fixed ImportError with NumPy < 1.7 and Python 3.x in _register_patched_dtype_reduce. [#5848]

Version 1.0.11 (2016-12-22)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Initialising a SkyCoord from a list containing a single SkyCoord no longer removes the distance from the coordinate. [#5270]

• Fix errors in the implementation of the conversion to and from FK4 frames without e-terms, which will have affected coordinates not on the unit sphere (i.e., with distances). [#4293]

• Fix bug where with cds units enabled it was no longer possible to initialize an Angle. [#5483]

• Ensure that search_around_sky and search_around_3d return integer type index arrays for empty (non) matches. [#4877, #5083]

• Return an empty set of matches for search_around_sky and search_around_3d when one or both of the input coordinate arrays is empty. [#4875, #5083]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a bug with empty value at end of tab-delimited table on Windows. [#5370]

• Fix reading of big ASCII tables (more than 2Gb) with the fast reader. [#5319]

• Fix segfault with FastCsv and row with too many columns. [#5534]

• Fix problem reading an AASTex format table that does not have \\ at the end of the last table row. [#5427]

astropy.io.fits

• Removed raising of AssertionError that could occur after closing or deleting compressed image data. [#4690, #4694, #4948]

• Fixed bug that caused an ignored exception to be displayed under certain conditions when terminating a script after using fits.getdata(). [#4977]

• Fixed usage of inplace operations that were raising an exception with recent versions of Numpy due to implicit casting. [#5250]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed bug of Resource.__repr__() having undefined attributes and variables. [#5382]

astropy.modeling

• CompoundModel now correctly inherits _n_models, allowing the use of model sets [#5358]

astropy.units

• Fixed bug in Ci definition. [#5106]

• Non-ascii cds unit strings are now correctly represented using str also on python2. This solves bugs in parsing coordinates involving strings too. [#5355]

• Ensure Quantity supports np.float_power, which is new in numpy 1.12. [#5480]

astropy.utils

• Fixed AttributeError when calling utils.misc.signal_number_to_name with Python3 [#5430].

astropy.wcs

• Update the _naxis{x} attributes when calling WCS.slice. [#5411]

Other Changes and Additions

• The bundled ERFA was updated to version 1.3.0. This includes the leap second planned for 2016 Dec 31. [#5418]

Version 1.0.10 (2016-06-09)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• SkyCoord objects created before a new frame which has frame attributes is created no longer raise AttributeError when the new attributes are accessed [#5021]

• Fix some errors in the implementation of aberration for get_sun. [#4979]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix problem reading a zero-length ECSV table with a bool type column. [#5010]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix convenience functions (getdata, getheader, append, update) to close files. [#4786]

astropy.io.votable

• The astropy.io.votable.validator.html module is updated to handle division by zero when generating validation report. [#4699]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug where pprint() sometimes raises UnicodeDecodeError in Python 2. [#4946]

• Fix bug when doing outer join on multi-dimensional columns. [#4060]

• Fixed bug where Tables created from existing Table objects were not inheriting the primary_key attribute. [#4672]

astropy.tests

• Fix coverage reporting in Python 3. [#4822]

astropy.units

• Duplicates between long and short names are now removed in the names and aliases properties of units. [#5036]

astropy.utils

• The astropy.utils.xml.unescaper module now also unescapes '%2F' to '/' and '&&' to '&' in a given URL. [#4699]

• Fix two problems related to the download cache: clear_download_cache() does not work in Python 2.7 and downloading in Python 2.7 and then Python 3 can result in an exception. [#4810]

astropy.vo

• Cache option now properly caches both downloaded JSON database and XML VO tables. [#4699]

• The astropy.vo.validator.conf.conesearch_urls listing is updated to reflect external changes to some VizieR Cone Search services. [#4699]

• VOSDatabase decodes byte-string to UTF-8 instead of ASCII to avoid UnicodeDecodeError for some rare cases. Fixed a Cone Search test that is failing as a side-effect of #4699. [#4757]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated astropy.tests test runner code to work with Coverage v4.0 when generating test coverage reports. [#4176]

Version 1.0.9 (2016-03-10)

New Features

astropy.nddata

• NDArithmeticMixin check for matching WCS now works with astropy.wcs.WCS objects [#4499, #4503]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Correct a bug in which psf_pad and fft_pad would be ignored [#4366]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed addition of new line characters after last row of data in ascii.latex.AASTex. [#4561]

• Fixed reading of Latex tables where the \tabular tag is in the first line. [#4595]

• Fix use of plain format strings with the fast writer. [#4517]

• Fix bug writing space-delimited file when table has empty fields. [#4417]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed possible segfault during error handling in FITS tile compression. [#4489]

• Fixed crash on pickling of binary table columns with the ‘X’, ‘P’, or ‘Q’ format. [#4514]

• Fixed memory / reference leak that could occur when copying a FITS_rec object (the .data for table HDUs). [#520]

• Fixed a memory / reference leak in FITS_rec that occurred in a wide range of cases, especially after writing FITS tables to a file, but in other cases as well. [#4539]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed display of compound model expressions and components when printing compound model instances. [#4414, #4482]

astropy.stats

• the input for median_absolute_deviation will not be cast to plain numpy arrays when given subclasses of numpy arrays (like Quantity, numpy.ma.MaskedArray, etc.) [#4658]

• Fixed incorrect results when using median_absolute_deviation with masked arrays. [#4658]

astropy.utils

• The zest.releaser hooks included in Astropy are now injected locally to Astropy, rather than being global. [#4650]

astropy.visualization

• Fixed fits2bitmap script to allow ext flag to contain extension names or numbers. [#4468]

• Fixed fits2bitmap default output filename generation for compressed FITS files. [#4468]

Version 1.0.8 (2016-01-08)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed an bug where updates to string columns in FITS tables were not saved on Python 3. [#4452]

astropy.units

• In-place peak-to-peak calculations now work on Quantity. [#4442]

astropy.utils

• Fixed find_api_page to work correctly on python 3.x [#4378, #4379]

Version 1.0.7 (2015-12-04)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Pickling of EarthLocation instances now also works on Python 2. [#4304]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix fast writer so bytestring column output is not prefixed by ‘b’ in Python 3. [#4350]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed a regression that could cause writes of large FITS files to be truncated. [#4307]

• Astropy v1.0.6 included a fix (#4228) for an obscure case where the TDIM of a table column is smaller than the repeat count of its data format. This updates that fix in such a way that it works with Numpy 1.10 as well. [#4266]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug when pickling a Table with mixin columns (e.g. Time). [#4098]

astropy.time

• Fix incorrect value attribute for epoch formats like “unix” when scale is different from the class epoch_scale. [#4312]

astropy.utils

• Fixed an issue where if ipython is installed but ipykernel is not installed then importing astropy from the ipython console gave an IPython.kernel deprecation warning. [#4279]

• Fixed crash that could occur in ProgressBar when astropy is imported in an IPython startup script. [#4274]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers to v1.0.6. [#4372]

Version 1.0.6 (2015-10-22)

Bug Fixes

astropy.analytic_functions

• Fixed blackbody analytic functions to properly support arrays of temperatures. [#4251]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed errors in transformations for objects within a few AU of the Earth. Included substantive changes to transformation machinery that may change distances at levels ~machine precision for other objects. [#4254]

astropy.io.fits

• fitsdiff and related functions now do a better job reporting differences between values that are different types but have the same representation (ex: the string ‘0’ versus the number 0). [#4122]

• Miscellaneous fixes for supporting Numpy 1.10. [#4228]

• Fixed an issue where writing a column of unicode strings to a FITS table resulted in a quadrupling of size of the column (i.e. the format of the FITS column was 4 characters for every one in the original strings). [#4228]

• Added support for an obscure case (but nonetheless allowed by the FITS standard) where a column has some TDIMn keyword, but a repeat count in the TFORMn column greater than the number of elements implied by the TDIMn. For example TFORMn = 100I, but TDIMn = ‘(5,5)’. In this case the TDIMn implies 5x5 arrays in the column, but the TFORMn implies a 100 element 1-D array in the column. In this case the TDIM takes precedence, and the remaining bytes in the column are ignored. [#4228]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed crash with Python compiler optimization level = 2. [#4231]

astropy.vo

• Fixed check_conesearch_sites with parallel=True on Python >= 3.3 and on Windows (it was broken in both those cases for separate reasons). [#2970]

Other Changes and Additions

• All tests now pass against Numpy v1.10.x. This implies nominal support for Numpy 1.10.x moving forward (but there may still be unknown issues). For example, there is already a known performance issue with tables containing large multi-dimensional columns–for example, tables that contain entire images in one or more of their columns. This is a known upstream issue in Numpy. [#4259]

Version 1.0.5 (2015-10-05)

Bug Fixes

astropy.constants

• Rename units -> unit and error -> uncertainty in the repr and str of constants to match attribute names. [#4147]

astropy.coordinates

• Fix string representation of SkyCoord objects transformed into the AltAz frame [#4055, #4057]

• Fix the search_around_sky function to allow storekdtree to be False as was intended. [#4082, #4212]

astropy.io.fits

• Fix bug when extending one header (without comments) with another (with comments). [#3967]

• Somewhat improved resource usage for FITS data–previously a new mmap was opened for each HDU of a FITS file accessed through an HDUList. Each mmap used up a single file descriptor, causing problems with system resource limits for some users. Now only a single mmap is opened, and shared for the data of all HDUs. Note: The problem still persists with using the “convenience” functions. For example using fits.getdata will create one mmap per HDU read this way (as opposed to opening the file with fits.open and accessing the HDUs through the HDUList object). [#4097]

• Fix bug where reading a file without a newline failed with an unrelated / unhelpful exception. [#4160]

astropy.modeling

• Cleaned up repr of models that have no parameters. [#4076]

astropy.nddata

• Initializing NDDataArray from another instance now sets flags as expected and no longer fails when uncertainty is set [#4129]. Initializing an NDData subclass from a parent instance (eg. NDDataArray from NDData) now sets the attributes other than data as it should [#4130, #4137].

astropy.table

• Fix an issue with setting fill value when column dtype is changed. [#4088]

• Fix bug when unpickling a bare Column where the _parent_table attribute was not set. This impacted the Column representation. [#4099]

• Fix issue with the web browser opening with an empty page, and ensure that the url is correctly formatted for Windows. [#4132]

• Fix NameError in table stack exception message. [#4213]

astropy.utils

• resolve_name no longer causes sys.modules to be cluttered with additional copies of modules under a package imported like resolve_name('numpy'). [#4084]

• console was updated to support IPython 4.x and Jupyter 1.x. This should suppress a ShimWarning that was appearing at import of astropy with IPython 4.0 or later. [#4078]

• Temporary downloaded files created by get_readable_fileobj when passed a URL are now deleted immediately after the file is closed. [#4198]

astropy.visualization

• The color for axes labels was set to white. Since white labels on white background are hard to read, the label color has been changed to black. [#4143]

• ImageNormalize now automatically determines vmin/vmax (via the autoscale_None method) when they have not been set explicitly. [#4117]

astropy.vo

• Cone Search validation no longer crashes when the provider gives an incomplete test query. It also ensures search radius for a test query is not too large to avoid timeout. [#4158, #4159]

Other Changes and Additions

• Astropy now supports Python 3.5. [#4027]

• Updated bundled version of astropy-helpers to 1.0.5. [#4215]

• Updated tests to support py.test 2.7, and upgraded the bundled copy of py.test to v2.7.3. [#4027]

Version 1.0.4 (2015-08-11)

New Features

astropy.convolution

• Modified Cython functions to release the GIL. This enables convolution to be parallelized effectively and gives large speedups when used with multithreaded task schedulers such as Dask. [#3949]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• Some transformations for an input coordinate that’s a scalar now correctly return a scalar. This was always the intended behavior, but it may break code that has been written to work-around this bug, so it may be viewed as an unplanned API change [#3920, #4039]

astropy.visualization

• The astropy_mpl_style no longer sets interactive to True, but instead leaves it at the user preference. This makes using the style compatible with building docs with Sphinx, and other non-interactive contexts. [#4030]

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fix bug where coordinate representation setting gets reset to default value when coordinate array is indexed or sliced. [#3824]

• Fixed confusing warning message shown when using dates outside current IERS data. [#3844]

• get_sun now yields a scalar when the input time is a scalar (this was a regression in v1.0.3 from v1.0.2) [#3998, #4039]

• Fixed bug where some scalar coordinates were incorrectly being changed to length-1 array coordinates after transforming through certain frames. [#3920, #4039]

• Fixed bug causing the separation methods of SkyCoord and frame classes to fail due to infinite recursion [#4033, #4039]

• Made it so that passing in a list of SkyCoord objects that are in UnitSphericalRepresentation to the SkyCoord constructor appropriately yields a new object in UnitSphericalRepresentation [#3938, #4039]

astropy.cosmology

• Fixed wCDM to not ignore the Ob0 parameter on initialization. [#3934]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed crash when updating data in a random groups HDU opened in update mode. [#3730]

• Fixed incorrect checksum / datasum being written when re-writing a scaled HDU (i.e. non-trivial BSCALE and/or BZERO) with do_not_scale_image_data=False. [#3883]

• Fixed stray deprecation warning in BinTableHDU.copy(). [#3798]

• Better handling of the BLANK keyword when auto-scaling scaled image data. The BLANK keyword is now removed from the header after auto-scaling is applied, and it is restored properly (with floating point NaNs replaced by the filler value) when updating a file opened with the scale_back=True argument. Invalid usage of the BLANK keyword is also better warned about during validation. [#3865]

• Reading memmaped scaled images won’t fail when do_not_scale_image_data=True (that is, since we’re just reading the raw / physical data there is no reason mmap can’t be used). [#3766]

• Fixed a reference cycle that could sometimes cause FITS table-related objects (BinTableHDU, ColDefs, etc.) to hang around in memory longer than expected. [#4012]

astropy.modeling

• Improved support for pickling of compound models, including both compound model instances, and new compound model classes. [#3867]

• Added missing default values for Ellipse2D parameters. [#3903]

astropy.time

• Fixed iteration of scalar Time objects so that iter() correctly raises a TypeError on them (while still allowing Time arrays to be iterated). [#4048]

astropy.units

• Added frequency-equivalency check when declaring doppler equivalencies [#3728]

• Define floor_divide (//) for Quantity to be consistent divmod, such that it only works where the quotient is dimensionless. This guarantees that (q1 // q2) * q2 + (q1 % q2) == q1. [#3817]

• Fixed the documentation of supported units to correctly report support for SI prefixes. Previously the table of supported units incorrectly showed several derived unit as not supporting prefixes, when in fact they do. [#3835]

• Fix a crash when calling astropy.units.cds.enable(). This will now “set” rather than “add” units to the active set to avoid the namespace clash with the default units. [#3873]

• Ensure in-place operations on float32 quantities work. [#4007]

astropy.utils

• The deprecated decorator did not correctly wrap classes that have a custom metaclass–the metaclass could be dropped from the deprecated version of the class. [#3997]

• The wraps decorator would copy the wrapped function’s name to the wrapper function even when '__name__' is excluded from the assigned argument. [#4016]

Misc

• fitscheck no longer causes scaled image data to be rescaled when adding checksums to existing files. [#3884]

• Fixed an issue where running import astropy from within the source tree did not automatically build the extension modules if the source is from a source distribution (as opposed to a git repository). [#3932]

• Fixed multiple instances of a bug that prevented Astropy from being used when compiled with the python -OO flag, due to it causing all docstrings to be stripped out. [#3923]

• Removed source code template files that were being installed accidentally alongside installed Python modules. [#4014]

• Fixed a bug in the exception logging that caused a crash in the exception handler itself on Python 3 when exceptions do not include a message. [#4056]

Version 1.0.3 (2015-06-05)

New Features

astropy.table

• Greatly improved the speed of printing a large table to the screen when only a few rows are being displayed. [#3796]

astropy.time

• Add support for the 2015-Jun-30 leap second. [#3794]

API Changes

astropy.io.ascii

• Note that HTML formatted tables will not always be found with guess mode unless it passes certain heuristics that strongly suggest the presence of HTML in the input. Code that expects to read tables from HTML should specify format='html' explicitly. See bug fixes below for more details. [#3693]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• Fix issue with repeated normalizations of Kernels. [#3747]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed get_sun to yield frames with the obstime set to what’s passed into the function (previously it incorrectly always had J2000). [#3750]

• Fixed get_sun to account for aberration of light. [#3750]

• Fixed error in the GCRS->ICRS transformation that gave incorrect distances. [#3750]

astropy.io.ascii

• Remove HTML from the list of automatically-guessed formats when reading if the file does not appear to be HTML. This was necessary to avoid a commonly-encountered segmentation fault occurring in the libxml parser on MacOSX. [#3693]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixes to support the upcoming Numpy 1.10. [#3419]

astropy.modeling

• Polynomials are now scaled when used in a compound model. [#3702]

• Fixed the Ellipse2D model to be consistent with Disk2D in how pixels are included. [#3736]

• Fixed crash when evaluating a model that accepts no inputs. [#3772]

astropy.testing

• The Astropy py.test plugins that disable unintentional internet access in tests were also blocking use of local UNIX sockets in tests, which prevented testing some multiprocessing code–fixed. [#3713]

astropy.units

• Supported full SI prefixes for the barn unit (“picobarn”, “femtobarn”, etc.) [#3753]

• Fix loss of precision when multiplying non-whole-numbered powers of units together. For example, before this change, (u.m ** 1.5) ** Fraction(4, 5) resulted in an inaccurate floating-point power of 1.2000000000000002. After this change, the exact rational number of Fraction(6, 5) is maintained. [#3790]

• Fixed printing of object ndarrays containing multiple Quantity objects with differing / incompatible units. Note: Unit conversion errors now cause a UnitConversionError exception to be raised. However, this is a subclass of the UnitsError exception used previously, so existing code that catches UnitsError should still work. [#3778]

Other Changes and Additions

• Added a new astropy.__bibtex__ attribute which gives a citation for Astropy in bibtex format. [#3697]

• The bundled version of ERFA was updated to v1.2.0 to address leapsecond updates. [#3802]

Version 0.4.6 (2015-05-29)

Bug Fixes

astropy.time

• Fixed ERFA code to handle the 2015-Jun-30 leap second. [#3795]

Version 1.0.2 (2015-04-16)

New Features

astropy.modeling

• Added support for polynomials with degree 0 or degree greater than 15. [#3574, 3589]

Bug Fixes

astropy.config

• The pre-astropy-0.4 configuration API has been fixed. It was inadvertently broken in 1.0.1. [#3627]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed a severe memory leak that occurred when reading tile compressed images. [#3680]

• Fixed bug where column data could be unintentionally byte-swapped when copying data from an existing FITS file to a new FITS table with a TDIMn keyword for that column. [#3561]

• The ColDefs.change_attrib, ColDefs.change_name, and ColDefs.change_unit methods now work as advertised. It is also possible (and preferable) to update attributes directly on Column objects (for example setting column.name), and the change will be accurately reflected in any associated table data and its FITS header. [#3283, #1539, #2618]

• Fixes an issue with the FITS_rec interface to FITS table data, where a FITS_rec created by copying an existing FITS table but adding new rows could not be sliced or masked correctly. [#3641]

• Fixed handling of BINTABLE with TDIMn of size 1. [#3580]

astropy.io.votable

• Loading a TABLE element without any DATA now correctly creates a 0-row array. [#3636]

astropy.modeling

• Added workaround to support inverses on compound models when one of the sub-models is itself a compound model with a manually-assigned custom inverse. [#3542]

• Fixed instantiation of polynomial models with constraints for parameters (constraints could still be assigned after instantiation, but not during). [#3606]

• Fixed fitting of 2D polynomial models with the LeVMarLSQFitter. [#3606]

astropy.table

• Ensure QTable can be pickled [#3590]

• Some corner cases when instantiating an astropy.table.Table with a Numpy array are handled [#3637]. Notably:

• a zero-length array is the same as passing None

• a scalar raises a ValueError

• a one-dimensional array is treated as a single row of a table.

• Ensure a Column without units is treated as an array, not as an dimensionless Quantity. [#3648]

astropy.units

• Ensure equivalencies that do more than just scale a Quantity are properly handled also in ufunc evaluations. [#2496, #3586]

• The LaTeX representation of the Angstrom unit has changed from \overset{\circ}{A} to \mathring{A}, which should have better support across regular LaTeX, MathJax and matplotlib (as of version 1.5) [#3617]

astropy.vo

• Using HTTPS/SSL for communication between SAMP hubs now works correctly on all supported versions of Python [#3613]

astropy.wcs

• When no relax argument is passed to WCS.to_header() and the result omits non-standard WCS keywords, a warning is emitted. [#3652]

Other Changes and Additions

astropy.vo

• The number of retries for connections in astropy.vo.samp can now be configured by a n_retries configuration option. [#3612]

• Testing

• Running astropy.test() from within the IPython prompt has been provisionally re-enabled. [#3184]

Version 1.0.1 (2015-03-06)

Bug Fixes

astropy.constants

• Ensure constants can be turned into Quantity safely. [#3537, #3538]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a segfault in the fast C parser when one of the column headers is empty [#3545].

• Fixed support for reading inf and nan values with the fast reader in Windows. Also fixed in the case of using use_fast_converter=True with the fast reader. [#3525]

• Fixed use of mmap in the fast reader on Windows. [#3525]

• Fixed issue where commented header would treat comments defining the table (i.e. column headers) as purely information comments, leading to problems when trying to round-trip the table. [#3562]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed propagation of parameter constraints (‘fixed’, ‘bounds’, ‘tied’) between compound models and their components. There is may still be some difficulty defining ‘tied’ constraints properly for use with compound models, however. [#3481]

astropy.nddata

• Restore several properties to the compatibility class NDDataArray that were inadvertently omitted [#3466].

astropy.time

• Time objects now always evaluate to True, except when empty. [#3530]

Miscellaneous

• The ERFA wrappers are now written directly in the Python/C API rather than using Cython, for greater performance. [#3521]

• Improve import time of astropy [#3488].

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers version to v1.0.1 to address installation issues with some packages that depend on Astropy. [#3541]

Version 1.0 (2015-02-18)

General

• Astropy now requires Numpy 1.6.0 or later.

New Features

astropy.analytic_functions

• The astropy.analytic_functions was added to contain analytic functions useful for astronomy [#3077].

astropy.coordinates

• astropy.coordinates now has a full stack of frames allowing transformations from ICRS or other celestial systems down to Alt/Az coordinates. [#3217]

• astropy.coordinates now has a get_sun function that gives the coordinates of the Sun at a specified time. [#3217]

• SkyCoord now has to_pixel and from_pixel methods that convert between celestial coordinates as SkyCoord objects and pixel coordinates given an astropy.wcs.WCS object. [#3002]

• SkyCoord now has search_around_sky and search_around_3d convenience methods that allow searching for all coordinates within a certain distance of another SkyCoord. [#2953]

• SkyCoord can now accept a frame instance for the frame= keyword argument. [#3063]

• SkyCoord now has a guess_from_table method that can be used to quickly create SkyCoord objects from an astropy.table.Table object. [#2951]

• astropy.coordinates now has a Galactocentric frame, a coordinate frame centered on a (user specified) center of the Milky Way. [#2761, #3286]

• SkyCoord now accepts more formats of the coordinate string when the representation has ra and dec attributes. [#2920]

• SkyCoord can now accept lists of SkyCoord objects, frame objects, or representation objects and will combine them into a single object. [#3285]

• Frames and SkyCoord instances now have a method is_equivalent_frame that can be used to check that two frames are equivalent (ignoring the data). [#3330]

• The __repr__ of coordinate objects now shows scalar coordinates in the same format as vector coordinates. [#3350, 3448]

astropy.cosmology

• Added lookback_distance, which is c * lookback_time. [#3145]

• Add baryonic matter density and dark matter only density parameters to cosmology objects [#2757].

• Add a clone method to cosmology objects to allow copies of cosmological objects to be created with the specified variables modified [#2592].

• Increase default numerical precision of z_at_value following the accurate by default, fast by explicit request model [#3074].

• Cosmology functions that take a single (redshift) input now broadcast like numpy ufuncs. So, passing an arbitrarily shaped array of inputs will produce an output of the same shape. [#3178, #3194]

astropy.io.ascii

• Simplify the way new Reader classes are defined, allowing custom behavior entirely by overriding inherited class attributes instead of setting instance attributes in the Reader __init__ method. [#2812]

• There is now a faster C/Cython engine available for reading and writing simple ASCII formats like CSV. Both are enabled by default, and fast reading will fall back on an ordinary reader in case of a parsing failure. Their behavior can be altered with the parameter fast_reader in read and fast_writer in write. [#2716]

• Make Latex/AASTex tables use unit attribute of Column for output. [#3064]

• Store comment lines encountered during reading in metadata of the output table via meta['comment_lines']. [#3222]

• Write comment lines in Table metadata during output for all basic formats, IPAC, and fast writers. This functionality can be disabled with comment=False. [#3255]

• Add reader / writer for the Enhanced CSV format which stores table and column meta data, in particular data type and unit. [#2319]

astropy.io.fits

• The fitsdiff script ignores some things by default when comparing fits files (e.g. empty header lines). This adds a --exact option where nothing is ignored. [#2782, #3110]

• The fitsheader script now takes a --keyword option to extract a specific keyword from the header of a FITS file, and a --table option to export headers into any of the data formats supported by astropy.table. [#2555, #2588]

• Section now supports all advanced indexing features ndarray does (slices with any steps, integer arrays, boolean arrays, None, Ellipsis). It also properly returns scalars when this is appropriate. [#3148]

astropy.io.votable

• astropy.io.votable.parse now takes a datatype_mapping keyword argument to map invalid datatype names to valid ones in order to support non-compliant files. [#2675]

astropy.modeling

• Added the capability of creating new “compound” models by combining existing models using arithmetic operators. See the “What’s New in 1.0” page in the Astropy documentation for more details. [#3231]

• A new custom_model decorator/factory function has been added for converting normal functions to Model classes that can work within the Astropy modeling framework. This replaces the old custom_model_1d function which is now deprecated. The new function works the same as the old one but is less limited in the types of models it can be used to created. [#1763]

• The Model and Fitter classes have .registry attributes which provide sets of all loaded Model and Fitter classes (this is useful for building UIs for models and fitting). [#2725]

• A dict-like meta member was added to Model. it is to be used to store any optional information which is relevant to a project and is not in the standard Model class. [#2189]

• Added Ellipse2D model. [#3124]

astropy.nddata

• New array-related utility functions in astropy.nddata.utils for adding and removing arrays from other arrays with different sizes/shapes. [#3201]

• New metaclass NDDataBase for enforcing the nddata interface in subclasses without restricting implementation of the data storage. [#2905]

• New mixin classes NDSlicingMixin for slicing, NDArithmeticMixin for arithmetic operations, and NDIOMixin for input/output in NDData. [#2905]

• Added a decorator support_nddata that can be used to write functions that can either take separate arguments or NDData objects. [#2855]

astropy.stats

• Added mad_std() function. [#3208]

• Added gaussian_fwhm_to_sigma and gaussian_sigma_to_fwhm constants. [#3208]

• New function sigma_clipped_stats which can be used to quickly get common statistics for an array, using sigma clipping at the same time. [#3201]

astropy.table

• Changed the internal implementation of the Table class changed so that it no longer uses numpy structured arrays as the core table data container. [#2790, #3179]

• Tables can now be written to an html file that includes interactive browsing capabilities. To write out to this format, use Table.write('filename.html', format='jsviewer'). [#2875]

• A quantity property and to method were added to Table columns that allow the column values to be easily converted to astropy.units.Quantity objects. [#2950]

• Add unique convenience method to table. [#3185]

astropy.tests

• Added a new Quantity-aware assert_quantity_allclose. [#3273]

astropy.time

• Time can now handle arbitrary array dimensions, with operations following standard numpy broadcasting rules. [#3138]

astropy.units

• Support for VOUnit has been updated to be compliant with version 1.0 of the standard. [#2901]

• Added an insert method to insert values into a Quantity object. This is similar to the numpy.insert function. [#3049]

• When viewed in IPython, Quantity objects with array values now render using LaTeX and scientific notation. [#2271]

• Added units.quantity_input decorator to validate quantity inputs to a function for unit compatibility. [#3072]

• Added units.astronomical_unit as a long form for units.au. [#3303]

astropy.utils

• Added a new decorator astropy.utils.wraps which acts as a replacement for the standard library’s functools.wraps, the only difference being that the decorated function also preserves the wrapped function’s call signature. [#2849]

• astropy.utils.compat.numpy has been revised such that it can include patched versions of routines from newer numpy versions. The first addition is a version of broadcast_arrays that can be used with Quantity and other ndarray subclasses (using the subok=True flag). [#2327]

• Added astropy.utils.resolve_name which returns a member of a module or class given the fully qualified dotted name of that object as a string. [#3389]

• Added astropy.utils.minversion which can be used to check minimum version requirements of Python modules (to test for specific features and/ or bugs and the like). [#3389]

astropy.visualization

• Created astropy.visualization module and added functionality relating to image normalization (i.e. stretching and scaling) as well as a new script fits2bitmap that can produce a bitmap image from a FITS file. [#3201]

• Added dictionary astropy.visualization.mpl_style.astropy_mpl_style which can be used to set a uniform plotstyle specifically for tutorials that is improved compared to matplotlib defaults. [#2719, #2787, #3200]

astropy.wcs

• wcslib has been upgraded to version 4.25. This brings a single new feature:

• equinox and radesys will now be given default values conforming with the WCS specification if EQUINOXa and RADESYSa, respectively, are not present in the header.

• The minimum required version of wcslib is now 4.24. [#2503]

• Added a new function wcs_to_celestial_frame that can be used to find the astropy.coordinates celestial frame corresponding to a particular WCS. [#2730]

• astropy.wcs.WCS.compare now supports a tolerance keyword argument to allow for approximate comparison of floating-point values. [#2503]

• added pixel_scale_matrix, celestial, is_celestial, and has_celestial convenience attributes. Added proj_plane_pixel_scales, proj_plane_pixel_area, and non_celestial_pixel_scales utility functions for retrieving WCS pixel scale and area information [#2832, #3304]

• Added two functions pixel_to_skycoord and skycoord_to_pixel that make it easy to convert between SkyCoord objects and pixel coordinates. [#2885]

• all_world2pix now uses a much more sophisticated and complete algorithm to iteratively compute the inverse WCS transform. [#2816]

• Add ability to use WCS object to define projections in Matplotlib, using the WCSAxes package. [#3183]

• Added is_proj_plane_distorted for testing if pixels are distorted. [#3329]

Misc

• astropy._erfa was added as a new subpackage wrapping the functionality of the ERFA library in python. This is primarily of use for other astropy subpackages, but the API may be made more public in the future. [#2992]

API Changes

astropy.coordinates

• Subclasses of BaseCoordinateFrame which define a custom repr should be aware of the format expected in SkyCoord.__repr__(), which changed in this release. [#2704, #2882]

• The CartesianPoints class (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]

• The previous astropy.coordinates.builtin_frames module is now a subpackage. Everything that was in the astropy.coordinates.builtin_frames module is still accessible from the new package, but the classes are now in separate modules. This should have no direct impact at the user level. [#3120]

• Support for passing a frame as a positional argument in the SkyCoord class has now been deprecated, except in the case where a frame with data is passed as the sole positional argument. [#3152]

• Improved __repr__ of coordinate objects representing a single coordinate point for the sake of easier copy/pasting. [#3350]

astropy.cosmology

• The functional interface to the cosmological routines as well as set_current and get_current (deprecated in v0.4) have now been removed. [#2990]

astropy.io.ascii

• Added a new argument to htmldict in the HTML reader named parser, which allows the user to specify which parser BeautifulSoup should use as a backend. [#2815]

• Add FixedWidthTwoLine reader to guessing. This will allows to read tables that a copied from screen output like print my_table to be read automatically. Discussed in #3025 and #3099 [#3109]

astropy.io.fits

• A new optional argument cache has been added to astropy.io.fits.open(). When opening a FITS file from a URL, cache is a boolean value specifying whether or not to save the file locally in Astropy’s download cache (True by default). [#3041]

astropy.modeling

• Model classes should now specify inputs and outputs class attributes instead of the old n_inputs and n_outputs. These should be tuples providing human-readable labels for all inputs and outputs of the model. The length of the tuple indicates the numbers of inputs and outputs. See “What’s New in Astropy 1.0” for more details. [#2835]

• It is no longer necessary to include __init__ or __call__ definitions in Model subclasses if all they do is wrap the super-method in order to provide a nice call signature to the docs. The inputs class attribute is now used to generate a nice call signature, so these methods should only be overridden by Model subclasses in order to provide new functionality. [#2835]

• Most models included in Astropy now have sensible default values for most or all of their parameters. Call help(ModelClass) on any model to check what those defaults are. Most of them time they should be overridden, but some of them are useful (for example spatial offsets are always set at the origin by default). Another rule of thumb is that, where possible, default parameters are set so that the model is a no-op, or close to it, by default. [#2932]

• The Model.inverse method has been changed to a property, so that now accessing model.inverse on a model returns a new model that implements that model’s inverse, and calling model.inverse(...)` on some independent variable computes the value of the inverse (similar to what the old Model.invert() method was meant to do). [#3024]

• The Model.invert() method has been removed entirely (it was never implemented and there should not be any existing code that relies on it). [#3024]

• custom_model_1d is deprecated in favor of the new custom_model (see “New Features” above). [#1763]

• The Model.param_dim property (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]

• The Beta1D and Beta2D models have been renamed to Moffat1D and Moffat2D. [#3029]

astropy.nddata

• flags, shape, size, dtype and ndim properties removed from astropy.nddata.NDData. [#2905]

• Arithmetic operations, uncertainty propagation, slicing and automatic conversion to a numpy array removed from astropy.nddata.NDData. The class astropy.nddata.NDDataArray is functionally equivalent to the old NDData. [#2905]

astropy.table

• The Column.units property (deprecated in v0.3) has now been removed. [#2990]

• The Row.data and Table._data attributes have been deprecated related to the change in Table implementation. They are replaced by Row.as_void() and Table.as_array() methods, respectively. [#2790]

• The Table.create_mask method has been removed. This undocumented method was a development orphan and would cause corruption of the table if called. [#2790]

• The return type for integer item access to a Column (e.g. col[12] or t[‘a’][12]) is now always a numpy scalar, numpy ndarray, or numpy MaskedArray. Previously if the column was multidimensional then a Column object would be returned. [#3095]

• The representation of Table and Column objects has been changed to be formatted similar to the print output. [#3239]

astropy.time

• The Time.val and Time.vals properties (deprecated in v0.3) and the Time.lon, and Time.lat properties (deprecated in v0.4) have now been removed. [#2990]

• Add decimalyear format that represents time as a decimal year. [#3265]

astropy.units

• Support for VOUnit has been updated to be compliant with version 1.0 of the standard. This means that some VOUnit strings that were rejected before are now acceptable. [#2901] Notably:

• SI prefixes are supported on most units

• Binary prefixes are supported on “bits” and “bytes”

• Custom units can be defined “inline” by placing them between single quotes.

• Unit.get_converter has been deprecated. It is not strictly necessary for end users, and it was confusing due to lack of support for Quantity objects. [#3456]

astropy.utils

• Some members of astropy.utils.misc were moved into new submodules. Specifically:

• deprecated, deprecated_attribute, and lazyproperty -> astropy.utils.decorators

• find_current_module, find_mod_objs -> astropy.utils.introspection

  All of these functions can be imported directly from astropy.utils which should be preferred over referencing individual submodules of astropy.utils. [#2857]

• The ProgressBar.iterate class method (deprecated in v0.3) has now been removed. [#2990]

• Updated astropy/utils/console.py ProgressBar() module to display output to IPython notebook with the addition of an interactive kwarg. [#2658, #2789]

astropy.wcs

• The WCS.calcFootprint method (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]

• An invalid unit in a CUNITn keyword now displays a warning and returns a UnrecognizedUnit instance rather than raising an exception [#3190]

Bug Fixes

astropy.convolution

• astropy.convolution.discretize_model now handles arbitrary callables correctly [#2274].

astropy.coordinates

• Angle.to_string now outputs unicode arrays instead of object arrays. [#2981]

• SkyCoord.to_string no longer gives an error when used with an array coordinate with more than one dimension. [#3340]

• Fixed support for subclasses of UnitSphericalRepresentation and SphericalRepresentation [#3354, #3366]

• Fixed latex display of array angles in IPython notebook. [#3480]

astropy.io.ascii

• In the CommentedHeader the data_start parameter now defaults to 0, which is the first uncommented line. Discussed in #2692. [#3054]

• Position lines in FixedWidthTwoLine reader could consist of many characters. Now, only one character in addition to the delimiter is allowed. This bug was discovered as part of [#3109]

• The IPAC table writer now consistently uses the fill_values keyword to specify the output null values. Previously the behavior was inconsistent or incorrect. [#3259]

• The IPAC table reader now correctly interprets abbreviated column types. [#3279]

• Tables that look almost, but not quite like DAOPhot tables could cause guessing to fail. [#3342]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed the problem in fits.open of some filenames with colon (:) in the name being recognized as URLs instead of file names. [#3122]

• Setting memmap=True in fits.open and related functions now raises a ValueError if opening a file in memory-mapped mode is impossible. [#2298]

• CONTINUE cards no longer end the value of the final card in the series with an ampersand, per the specification of the CONTINUE card convention. [#3282]

• Fixed a crash that occurred when reading an ASCII table containing zero-precision floating point fields. [#3422]

• When a float field for an ASCII table has zero-precision a decimal point (with no digits following it) is still written to the field as long as there is space for it, as recommended by the FITS standard. This makes it less ambiguous that these columns should be interpreted as floats. [#3422]

astropy.logger

• Fix a bug that occurred when displaying warnings that produced an error message dictionary changed size during iteration. [#3353]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a bug in SLSQPLSQFitter where the maxiter argument was not passed correctly to the optimizer. [#3339]

astropy.table

• Fix a problem where table.hstack fails to stack multiple references to the same table, e.g. table.hstack([t, t]). [#2995]

• Fixed a problem where table.vstack and table.hstack failed to stack a single table, e.g. table.vstack([t]). [#3313]

• Fix a problem when doing nested iterators on a single table. [#3358]

• Fix an error when an empty list, tuple, or ndarray is used for item access within a table. This now returns the table with no rows. [#3442]

astropy.time

• When creating a Time object from a datetime object the time zone info is now correctly used. [#3160]

• For Time objects, it is now checked that numerical input is finite. [#3396]

astropy.units

• Added a latex_inline unit format that returns the units in LaTeX math notation with negative exponents instead of fractions [#2622].

• When using a unit that is deprecated in a given unit format, non-deprecated alternatives will be suggested. [#2806] For example:

  >>> import astropy.units as u
  >>> u.Unit('Angstrom', format='fits')
  WARNING: UnitsWarning: The unit 'Angstrom' has been deprecated
  in the FITS standard. Suggested: nm (with data multiplied by
  0.1).  [astropy.units.format.utils]
  

astropy.utils

• treat_deprecations_as_exceptions has been fixed to recognize Astropy deprecation warnings. [#3015]

• Converted representation of progress bar units without suffix from float to int in console.human_file_size. [#2201, #2202, #2721, #3299]

astropy.wcs

• astropy.wcs.WCS.sub now accepts unicode strings as input on Python 2.x [#3356]

Misc

• Some modules and tests that would crash upon import when using a non-final release of Numpy (e.g. 1.9.0rc1). [#3471]

Other Changes and Additions

• The bundled copy of astropy-helpers has been updated to v1.0. [#3515]

• Updated astropy.extern.configobj to Version 5. Version 5 uses six and the same code covers both Python 2 and Python 3. [#3149]

astropy.coordinates

• The repr of SkyCoord and coordinate frame classes now separate frame attributes and coordinate information. [#2704, #2882]

astropy.io.fits

• Overwriting an existing file using the clobber=True option no longer displays a warning message. [#1963]

• fits.open no longer catches OSError exceptions on missing or unreadable files– instead it raises the standard Python exceptions in such cases. [#2756, #2785]

astropy.table

• Sped up setting of Column slices by an order of magnitude. [#2994, #3020]

• Updated the bundled six module to version 1.7.3 and made 1.7.3 the minimum acceptable version of six. [#2814]

• The version of ERFA included with Astropy is now v1.1.1 [#2971]

• The code base is now fully Python 2 and 3 compatible and no longer requires 2to3. [#2033]

• funcsigs is included in utils.compat, but defaults to the inspect module components where available (3.3+) [#3151].

• The list of modules displayed in the pytest header can now be customized. [#3157]

• jinja2>=2.7 is now required to build the source code from the git repository, in order to allow the ERFA wrappers to be generated. [#3166]

Version 0.4.5 (2015-02-16)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed unnecessary attempt to run git when importing astropy. In particular, fixed a crash in Python 3 that could result from this when importing Astropy when the current working directory is an empty git repository. [#3475]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled copy of astropy-helpers to v0.4.6. [#3508]

Version 0.4.4 (2015-01-21)

Bug Fixes

astropy.vo.samp

• astropy.vo.samp is now usable on Python builds that do not support the SSLv3 protocol (which depends both on the version of Python and the version of OpenSSL or LibreSSL that it is built against.) [#3308]

API Changes

astropy.vo.samp

• The default SSL protocol used is now determined from the default used in the Python ssl standard library. This default may be different depending on the exact version of Python you are using. [#3308]

astropy.wcs

• WCS allows slices of the form slice(None, x, y), which previously resulted in an unsliced copy being returned (note: this was previously incorrectly reported as fixed in v0.4.3) [#2909]

Version 0.4.3 (2015-01-15)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• The Distance class has been fixed to no longer rely on the deprecated cosmology functions. [#2991]

• Ensure float32 values can be used in coordinate representations. [#2983]

• Fix frame attribute inheritance in SkyCoord.transform_to() method so that the default attribute value (e.g. equinox) for the destination frame gets used if no corresponding value was explicitly specified. [#3106]

• Angle accepts hours:mins or deg:mins initializers (without seconds). In these cases float minutes are also accepted. [#2843]

• astropy.coordinates.SkyCoord objects are now copyable. [#2888]

• astropy.coordinates.SkyCoord object attributes are now immutable. It is still technically possible to change the internal data for an array-valued coordinate object but this leads to inconsistencies [#2889] and should not be done. [#2888]

astropy.cosmology

• The ztol keyword argument to z_at_value now works correctly [#2993].

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix a bug in Python 3 when guessing file format using a file object as input. Also improve performance in same situation for Python 2. [#3132]

• Fix a problem where URL was being downloaded for each guess. [#2001]

astropy.io.fits

• The in operator now works correctly for checking if an extension is in an HDUList (as given via EXTNAME, (EXTNAME, EXTVER) tuples, etc.) [#3060]

• Added workaround for bug in MacOS X <= 10.8 that caused np.fromfile to fail. [#3078]

• Added support for the RICE_ONE compression type synonym. [#3115]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed a test failure on Debian/PowerPC and Debian/s390x. [#2708]

• Fixed crash in evaluating models that have more outputs than inputs–this case may not be handled as desired for all conceivable models of this format (some may have to implement custom prepare_inputs and prepare_outputs methods). But as long as all outputs can be assumed to have a shape determined from the broadcast of all inputs with all parameters then this can be used safely. [#3250]

astropy.table

• Fix a bug that caused join to fail for multi-dimensional columns. [#2984]

• Fix a bug where MaskedColumn attributes which had been changed since the object was created were not being carried through when slicing. [#3023]

• Fix a bug that prevented initializing a table from a structured array with multi-dimensional columns with copy=True. [#3034]

• Fixed unnecessarily large unicode columns when instantiating a table from row data on Python 3. [#3052]

• Improved the warning message when unable to aggregate non-numeric columns. [#2700]

astropy.units

• Operations on quantities with incompatible types now raises a much more informative TypeError. [#2934]

• Quantity.tolist now overrides the ndarray method to give a NotImplementedError (by renaming the previous list method). [#3050]

• Quantity.round now always returns a Quantity (previously it returned an ndarray for decimals>0). [#3062]

• Ensured np.squeeze always returns a Quantity (it only worked if no dimensions were removed). [#3045]

• Input to Quantity with a unit attribute no longer can get mangled with copy=False. [#3051]

• Remove trailing space in __format__ calls for dimensionless quantities. [#3097]

• Comparisons between units and non-unit-like objects now works correctly. [#3108]

• Units with fractional powers are now correctly multiplied together by using rational arithmetic. [#3121]

• Removed a few entries from spectral density equivalencies which did not make sense. [#3153]

astropy.utils

• Fixed an issue with the deprecated decorator on classes that invoke super() in their __init__ method. [#3004]

• Fixed a bug which caused the metadata_conflicts parameter to be ignored in the astropy.utils.metadata.merge function. [#3294]

astropy.vo

• Fixed an issue with reconnecting to a SAMP Hub. [#2674]

astropy.wcs

• Invalid or out of range values passed to wcs_world2pix will now be correctly identified and returned as nan values. [#2965]

• Fixed an issue which meant that Python thought WCS objects were iterable. [#3066]

Misc

• Astropy will now work if your Python interpreter does not have the bz2 module installed. [#3104]

• Fixed ResourceWarning for astropy/extern/bundled/six.py that could occur sometimes after using Astropy in Python 3.4. [#3156]

Other Changes and Additions

astropy.coordinates

• Improved the agreement of the FK5 <-> Galactic conversion with other codes, and with the FK5 <-> FK4 <-> Galactic route. [#3107]

Version 0.4.2 (2014-09-23)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Angle accepts hours:mins or deg:mins initializers (without seconds). In these cases float minutes are also accepted.

• The repr for coordinate frames now displays the frame attributes (ex: ra, dec) in a consistent order. It should be noted that as part of this fix, the BaseCoordinateFrame.get_frame_attr_names() method now returns an OrderedDict instead of just a dict. [#2845]

astropy.io.fits

• Fixed a crash when reading scaled float data out of a FITS file that was loaded from a string (using HDUList.fromfile) rather than from a file. [#2710]

• Fixed a crash when reading data from an HDU whose header contained in invalid value for the BLANK keyword (e.g., a string value instead of an integer as required by the FITS Standard). Invalid BLANK keywords are now warned about, but are otherwise ignored. [#2711]

• Fixed a crash when reading the header of a tile-compressed HDU if that header contained invalid duplicate keywords resulting in a KeyError [#2750]

• Fixed crash when reading gzip-compressed FITS tables through the Astropy Table interface. [#2783]

• Fixed corruption when writing new FITS files through to gzipped files. [#2794]

• Fixed crash when writing HDUs made with non-contiguous data arrays to file-like objects. [#2794]

• It is now possible to create astropy.io.fits.BinTableHDU objects with a table with zero rows. [#2916]

astropy.io.misc

• Fixed a bug that prevented h5py Dataset objects from being automatically recognized by Table.read. [#2831]

astropy.modeling

• Make LevMarLSQFitter work with weights keyword. [#2900]

astropy.table

• Fixed reference cycle in tables that could prevent Table objects from being freed from memory. [#2879]

• Fixed an issue where Table.pprint() did not print the header to stdout when stdout is redirected (say, to a file). [#2878]

• Fixed printing of masked values when a format is specified. [#1026]

• Ensured that numpy ufuncs that return booleans return plain ndarray instances, just like the comparison operators. [#2963]

astropy.time

• Ensure bigendian input to Time works on a little-endian machine (and vice versa). [#2942]

astropy.units

• Ensure unit is kept when adding 0 to quantities. [#2968]

astropy.utils

• Fixed color printing on Windows with IPython 2.0. [#2878]

astropy.vo

• Improved error message on Cone Search time out. [#2687]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed a couple issues with files being inappropriately included and/or excluded from the source archive distributions of Astropy. [#2843, #2854]

• As part of fixing the fact that masked elements of table columns could not be printed when a format was specified, the column format string options were expanded to allow simple specifiers such as '5.2f'. [#2898]

• Ensure numpy 1.9 is supported. [#2917]

• Ensure numpy master is supported, by making np.cbrt work with quantities. [#2937]

Version 0.4.1 (2014-08-08)

Bug Fixes

astropy.config

• Fixed a bug where an unedited configuration file from astropy 0.3.2 would not be correctly identified as unedited. [#2772] This resulted in the warning:

  WARNING: ConfigurationChangedWarning: The configuration options
  in astropy 0.4 may have changed, your configuration file was not
  updated in order to preserve local changes.  A new configuration
  template has been saved to
  '~/.astropy/config/astropy.0.4.cfg'. [astropy.config.configuration]
  

• Fixed the error message that is displayed when an old configuration item has moved. Before, the destination section was wrong. [#2772]

• Added configuration settings for io.fits, io.votable and table.jsviewer that were missing from the configuration file template. [#2772]

• The configuration template is no longer rewritten on every import of astropy, causing race conditions. [#2805]

astropy.convolution

• Fixed the multiplication of Kernel with numpy floats. [#2174]

astropy.coordinates

• Distance can now take a list of quantities. [#2261]

• For in-place operations for Angle instances in which the result unit is not an angle, an exception is raised before the instance is corrupted. [#2718]

• CartesianPoints are now deprecated in favor of CartesianRepresentation. [#2727]

astropy.io.misc

• An existing table within an HDF5 file can be overwritten without affecting other datasets in the same HDF5 file by simultaneously using overwrite=True and append=True arguments to the Table.write method. [#2624]

astropy.logger

• Fixed a crash that could occur in rare cases when (such as in bundled apps) where submodules of the email package are not importable. [#2671]

astropy.nddata

• astropy.nddata.NDData() no longer raises a ValueError when passed a numpy masked array which has no masked entries. [#2784]

astropy.table

• When saving a table to a FITS file containing a unit that is not supported by the FITS standard, a warning rather than an exception is raised. [#2797]

astropy.units

• By default, Quantity and its subclasses will now convert to float also numerical types such as decimal.Decimal, which are stored as objects by numpy. [#1419]

• The units count, pixel, voxel and dbyte now output to FITS, OGIP and VOUnit formats correctly. [#2798]

astropy.utils

• Restored missing information from deprecation warning messages from the deprecated decorator. [#2811]

• Fixed support for staticmethod deprecation in the deprecated decorator. [#2811]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed a memory leak when astropy.wcs.WCS objects are copied [#2754]

• Fixed a crash when passing ra_dec_order=True to any of the *2world methods. [#2791]

Other Changes and Additions

• Bundled copy of astropy-helpers upgraded to v0.4.1. [#2825]

• General improvements to documentation and docstrings [#2722, #2728, #2742]

• Made it easier for third-party packagers to have Astropy use their own version of the six module (so long as it meets the minimum version requirement) and remove the copy bundled with Astropy. See the astropy/extern/README file in the source tree. [#2623]

Version 0.4 (2014-07-16)

New Features

astropy.constants

• Added b_wien to represent Wien wavelength displacement law constant. [#2194]

astropy.convolution

• Changed the input parameter in Gaussian1DKernel and Gaussian2DKernel from width to stddev [#2085].

astropy.coordinates

• The coordinates package has undergone major changes to implement APE5 . These include backwards-incompatible changes, as the underlying framework has changed substantially. See the APE5 text and the package documentation for more details. [#2422]

• A position_angle method has been added to the new SkyCoord. [#2487]

• Updated Angle.dms and Angle.hms to return namedtuple -s instead of regular tuples, and added Angle.signed_dms attribute that gives the absolute value of the d, m, and s along with the sign. [#1988]

• By default, Distance objects are now required to be positive. To allow negative values, set allow_negative=True in the Distance constructor when creating a Distance instance.

• Longitude (resp. Latitude) objects cannot be used any more to initialize or set Latitude (resp. Longitude) objects. An explicit conversion to Angle is now required. [#2461]

• The deprecated functions for pre-0.3 coordinate object names like ICRSCoordinates have been removed. [#2422]

• The rotation_matrix and angle_axis functions in astropy.coordinates.angles were made more numerically consistent and are now tested explicitly [#2619]

astropy.cosmology

• Added z_at_value function to find the redshift at which a cosmology function matches a desired value. [#1909]

• Added FLRW.differential_comoving_volume method to give the differential comoving volume at redshift z. [#2103]

• The functional interface is now deprecated in favor of the more-explicit use of methods on cosmology objects. [#2343]

• Updated documentation to reflect the removal of the functional interface. [#2507]

astropy.io.ascii

• The astropy.io.ascii output formats latex and aastex accept a dictionary called latex_dict to specify options for LaTeX output. It is now possible to specify the table alignment within the text via the tablealign keyword. [#1838]

• If header_start is specified in a call to ascii.get_reader or any method that calls get_reader (e.g. ascii.read) but data_start is not specified at the same time, then data_start is calculated so that the data starts after the header. Before this, the default was that the header line was read again as the first data line [#855 and #1844].

• A new csv format was added as a convenience for handling CSV (comma- separated values) data. [#1935] This format also recognises rows with an inconsistent number of elements. [#1562]

• An option was added to guess the start of data for CDS format files when they do not strictly conform to the format standard. [#2241]

• Added an HTML reader and writer to the astropy.io.ascii package. Parsing requires the installation of BeautifulSoup and is therefore an optional feature. [#2160]

• Added support for inputting column descriptions and column units with the io.ascii.SExtractor reader. [#2372]

• Allow the use of non-local ReadMe files in the CDS reader. [#2329]

• Provide a mechanism to select how masked values are printed. [#2424]

• Added support for reading multi-aperture daophot file. [#2656]

astropy.io.fits

• Included a new command-line script called fitsheader to display the header(s) of a FITS file from the command line. [#2092]

• Added new verification options fix+ignore, fix+warn, fix+exception, silentfix+ignore, silentfix+warn, and silentfix+exception which give more control over how to report fixable errors as opposed to unfixable errors.

astropy.modeling

• Prototype implementation of fitters that treat optimization algorithms separately from fit statistics, allowing new fitters to be created by mixing and matching optimizers and statistic functions. [#1914]

• Slight overhaul to how inputs to and outputs from models are handled with respect to array-valued parameters and variables, as well as sets of multiple models. See the associated PR and the modeling section of the v0.4 documentation for more details. [#2634]

• Added a new SimplexLSQFitter which uses a downhill simplex optimizer with a least squares statistic. [#1914]

• Changed Gaussian2D model such that theta now increases counterclockwise. [#2199]

• Replaced the MatrixRotation2D model with a new model called simply Rotation2D which requires only an angle to specify the rotation. The new Rotation2D rotates in a counter-clockwise sense whereas the old MatrixRotation2D increased the angle clockwise. [#2266, #2269]

• Added a new AffineTransformation2D model which serves as a replacement for the capability of MatrixRotation2D to accept an arbitrary matrix, while also adding a translation capability. [#2269]

• Added GaussianAbsorption1D model. [#2215]

• New Redshift model [#2176].

astropy.nddata

• Allow initialization NDData or StdDevUncertainty with a Quantity. [#2380]

astropy.stats

• Added flat prior to binom_conf_interval and binned_binom_proportion

• Change default in sigma_clip from np.median to np.ma.median. [#2582]

astropy.sphinx

• Note, the following new features are included in astropy-helpers as well:

• The automodapi and automodsumm extensions now include sphinx configuration options to write out what automodapi and automodsumm generate, mainly for debugging purposes. [#1975, #2022]

• Reference documentation now shows functions/class docstrings at the intended user-facing API location rather than the actual file where the implementation is found. [#1826]

• The automodsumm extension configuration was changed to generate documentation of class __call__ member functions. [#1817, #2135]

• automodapi and automodsumm now have an :allowed-package-names: option that make it possible to document functions and classes that are in a different namespace. [#2370]

astropy.table

• Improved grouped table aggregation by using the numpy reduceat() method when possible. This can speed up the operation by a factor of at least 10 to 100 for large unmasked tables and columns with relatively small group sizes. [#2625]

• Allow row-oriented data input using a new rows keyword argument. [#850]

• Allow subclassing of Table and the component classes Row, Column, MaskedColumn, TableColumns, and TableFormatter. [#2287]

• Fix to allow numpy integer types as valid indices into tables in Python 3.x [#2477]

• Remove transition code related to the order change in Column and MaskedColumn arguments name and data from Astropy 0.2 to 0.3. [#2511]

• Change HTML table representation in IPython notebook to show all table columns instead of restricting to 80 column width. [#2651]

astropy.time

• Mean and apparent sidereal time can now be calculated using the sidereal_time method [#1418].

• The time scale now defaults to UTC if no scale is provided. [#2091]

• TimeDelta objects can have all scales but UTC, as well as, for consistency with time-like quantities, undefined scale (where the scale is taken from the object one adds to or subtracts from). This allows, e.g., to work consistently in TDB. [#1932]

• Time now supports ISO format strings that end in “Z”. [#2211, #2203]

astropy.units

• Support for the unit format Office of Guest Investigator Programs (OGIP) FITS files has been added. [#377]

• The spectral equivalency can now handle angular wave number. [#1306 and #1899]

• Added one as a shorthand for dimensionless_unscaled. [#1980]

• Added dex and dB units. [#1628]

• Added temperature() equivalencies to support conversion between Kelvin, Celsius, and Fahrenheit. [#2209]

• Added temperature_energy() equivalencies to support conversion between electron-volt and Kelvin. [#2637]

• The runtime of astropy.units.Unit.compose is greatly improved (by a factor of 2 in most cases) [#2544]

• Added electron unit. [#2599]

astropy.utils

• timer.RunTimePredictor now uses astropy.modeling in its do_fit() method. [#1896]

astropy.vo

• A new sub-package, astropy.vo.samp, is now available (this was previously the SAMPy package, which has been refactored for use in Astropy). [#1907]

• Enhanced functionalities for VOSCatalog and VOSDatabase. [#1206]

astropy.wcs

• astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.

• Bounds checking is now performed on native spherical coordinates. Any out-of-bounds values will be returned as NaN, and marked in the stat array, if using the low-level wcslib interface such as astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.p2s. [#2107]

• A new method, astropy.wcs.WCS.compare(), compares two wcsprm structs for equality with varying degrees of strictness. [#2361]

• New astropy.wcs.utils module, with a handful of tools for manipulating WCS objects, including dropping, swapping, and adding axes.

Misc

• Includes the new astropy-helpers package which separates some of Astropy’s build, installation, and documentation infrastructure out into an independent package, making it easier for Affiliated Packages to depend on these features. astropy-helpers replaces/deprecates some of the submodules in the astropy package (see API Changes below). See also APE 4 for more details on the motivation behind and implementation of astropy-helpers. [#1563]

API Changes

astropy.config

• The configuration system received a major overhaul, as part of APE3. It is no longer possible to save configuration items from Python, but instead users must edit the configuration file directly. The locations of configuration items have moved, and some have been changed to science state values. The old locations should continue to work until astropy 0.5, but deprecation warnings will be displayed. See the Configuration transition docs for a detailed description of the changes and how to update existing code. [#2094]

astropy.io.fits

• The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is now fully deprecated (though will not be removed for a long time, considering how widely it is used).

  Instead please use the more explicit BinTableHDU.from_columns to create a new binary table HDU, and the similar TableHDU.from_columns to create a new ASCII table. These otherwise accept the same arguments as new_table which is now just a wrapper for these.

• The .fromstring classmethod of each HDU type has been simplified such that, true to its namesake, it only initializes an HDU from a string containing its header and data.

• Fixed an issue where header wildcard matching (for example header['DATE*']) can be used to match any characters that might appear in a keyword. Previously this only matched keywords containing characters in the set [0-9A-Za-z_]. Now this can also match a hyphen - and any other characters, as some conventions like HIERARCH and record-valued keyword cards allow a wider range of valid characters than standard FITS keywords.

• This will be the last release to support the following APIs that have been marked deprecated since Astropy v0.1/PyFITS v3.1:

• The CardList class, which was part of the old header implementation.

• The Card.key attribute. Use Card.keyword instead.

• The Card.cardimage and Card.ascardimage attributes. Use simply Card.image or str(card) instead.

• The create_card factory function. Simply use the normal Card constructor instead.

• The create_card_from_string factory function. Use Card.fromstring instead.

• The upper_key function. Use Card.normalize_keyword method instead (this is not unlikely to be used outside of PyFITS itself, but it was technically public API).

• The usage of Header.update with Header.update(keyword, value, comment) arguments. Header.update should only be used analogously to dict.update. Use Header.set instead.

• The Header.ascard attribute. Use Header.cards instead for a list of all the Card objects in the header.

• The Header.rename_key method. Use Header.rename_keyword instead.

• The Header.get_history method. Use header['HISTORY'] instead (normal keyword lookup).

• The Header.get_comment method. Use header['COMMENT'] instead.

• The Header.toTxtFile method. Use header.totextfile instead.

• The Header.fromTxtFile method. Use Header.fromtextfile instead.

• The tdump and tcreate functions. Use tabledump and tableload respectively.

• The BinTableHDU.tdump and tcreate methods. Use BinTableHDU.dump and BinTableHDU.load respectively.

• The txtfile argument to the Header constructor. Use Header.fromfile instead.

• The startColumn and endColumn arguments to the FITS_record constructor. These are unlikely to be used by any user code.

  These deprecated interfaces will be removed from the development version of Astropy following the v0.4 release (they will still be available in any v0.4.x bugfix releases, however).

astropy.modeling

• The method computing the derivative of the model with respect to parameters was renamed from deriv to fit_deriv. [#1739]

• ParametricModel and the associated Parametric1DModel and Parametric2DModel classes have been renamed FittableModel, Fittable1DModel, and Fittable2DModel respectively. The base Model class has subsumed the functionality of the old

  ParametricModel class so that all models support parameter constraints. The only distinction of FittableModel is that anything which subclasses it is assumed “safe” to use with Astropy fitters. [#2276]

• NonLinearLSQFitter has been renamed LevMarLSQFitter to emphasise that it uses the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

• The SLSQPFitter class has been renamed SLSQPLSQFitter to emphasize that it uses the Sequential Least Squares Programming optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

• The Fitter.errorfunc method has been renamed to the more general Fitter.objective_function. [#1914]

astropy.nddata

• Issue warning if unit is changed from a non-trivial value by directly setting NDData.unit. [#2411]

• The mask and flag attributes of astropy.nddata.NDData can now be set with any array-like object instead of requiring that they be set with a numpy.ndarray. [#2419]

astropy.sphinx

• Use of the astropy.sphinx module is deprecated; all new development of this module is in astropy_helpers.sphinx which should be used instead (therefore documentation builds that made use of any of the utilities in astropy.sphinx now have astropy_helpers as a documentation dependency).

astropy.table

• The default table printing function now shows a table header row for units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#1282]

• Before, an unmasked Table was automatically converted to a masked table if generated from a masked Table or a MaskedColumn. Now, this conversion is only done if explicitly requested or if any of the input values is actually masked. [#1185]

• The repr() function of astropy.table.Table now shows the units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#2180]

• The semantics of the config options table.max_lines and table.max_width has changed slightly. If these values are not set in the config file, astropy will try to determine the size automatically from the terminal. [#2683]

astropy.time

• Correct use of UT in TDB calculation [#1938, #1939].

• TimeDelta objects can have scales other than TAI [#1932].

• Location information should now be passed on via an EarthLocation instance or anything that initialises it, e.g., a tuple containing either geocentric or geodetic coordinates. [#1928]

astropy.units

• Quantity now converts input to float by default, as this is physically most sensible for nearly all units [#1776].

• Quantity comparisons with == or != now always return True or False, even if units do not match (for which case a UnitsError used to be raised). [#2328]

• Applying float or int to a Quantity now works for all dimensionless quantities; they are automatically converted to unscaled dimensionless. [#2249]

• The exception astropy.units.UnitException, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use astropy.units.UnitError instead [#2386]

• Initializing a Quantity with a valid number/array with a unit attribute now interprets that attribute as the units of the input value. This makes it possible to initialize a Quantity from an Astropy Table column and have it correctly pick up the units from the column. [#2486]

astropy.wcs

• calcFootprint was deprecated. It is replaced by calc_footprint. An optional boolean keyword center was added to calc_footprint. It controls whether the centers or the corners of the pixels are used in the computation. [#2384]

• astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_pix2foc and astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_foc2pix formerly did not conform to the SIP standard: CRPIX was added to the foc result so that it could be used as input to “core FITS WCS”. As of astropy 0.4, CRPIX is no longer added to the result, so the foc space is correct as defined in the SIP convention. [#2360]

• astropy.wcs.UnitConverter, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use the astropy.units module instead. [#2386]

• The following methods on astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.1, have been removed [#2386]:

• all_pix2sky -> all_pix2world

• wcs_pix2sky -> wcs_pix2world

• wcs_sky2pix -> wcs_world2pix

• The naxis1 and naxis2 attributes and the get_naxis method of astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.2, have been removed. Use the shape of the underlying FITS data array instead. [#2386]

Misc

• The astropy.setup_helpers and astropy.version_helpers modules are deprecated; any non-critical fixes and development to those modules should be in astropy_helpers instead. Packages that use these modules in their setup.py should depend on astropy_helpers following the same pattern as in the Astropy package template.

Bug Fixes

astropy.constants

• astropy.constants.Contant objects can now be deep copied. [#2601]

astropy.cosmology

• The distance modulus function in astropy.cosmology can now handle negative distances, which can occur in certain closed cosmologies. [#2008]

• Removed accidental imports of some extraneous variables in astropy.cosmology [#2025]

astropy.io.ascii

• astropy.io.ascii.read would fail to read lists of strings where some of the strings consisted of just a newline (”n”). [#2648]

astropy.io.fits

• Use NaN for missing values in FITS when using Table.write for float columns. Earlier the default fill value was close to 1e20.[#2186]

• Fixes for checksums on 32-bit platforms. Results may be different if writing or checking checksums in “nonstandard” mode. [#2484]

• Additional minor bug fixes ported from PyFITS. [#2575]

astropy.io.votable

• It is now possible to save an astropy.table.Table object as a VOTable with any of the supported data formats, tabledata, binary and binary2, by using the tabledata_format kwarg. [#2138]

• Fixed a crash writing out variable length arrays. [#2577]

astropy.nddata

• Indexing NDData in a way that results in a single element returns that element. [#2170]

• Change construction of result of arithmetic and unit conversion to allow subclasses to require the presence of attribute like unit. [#2300]

• Scale uncertainties to correct units in arithmetic operations and unit conversion. [#2393]

• Ensure uncertainty and mask members are copied in arithmetic and convert_unit_to. [#2394]

• Mask result of arithmetic if either of the operands is masked. [#2403]

• Copy all attributes of input object if astropy.nddata.NDData is initialized with an NDData object. [#2406]

• Copy flags to new object in convert_unit_to. [#2409]

• Result of NDData arithmetic makes a copy of any WCS instead of using a reference. [#2410]

• Fix unit handling for multiplication/division and use astropy.units.Quantity for units arithmetic. [#2413]

• A masked NDData is now converted to a masked array when used in an operation or ufunc with a numpy array. [#2414]

• An unmasked NDData now uses an internal representation of its mask state that numpy.ma expects so that an NDData behaves as an unmasked array. [#2417]

astropy.sphinx

• Fix crash in smart resolver when the resolution doesn’t work. [#2591]

astropy.table

• The astropy.table.Column object can now use both functions and callable objects as formats. [#2313]

• Fixed a problem on 64 bit windows that caused errors “expected ‘DTYPE_t’ but got ‘long long’” [#2490]

• Fix initialisation of TableColumns with lists or tuples. [#2647]

• Fix removal of single column using remove_columns. [#2699]

• Fix a problem that setting a row element within a masked table did not update the corresponding table element. [#2734]

astropy.time

• Correct UT1->UTC->UT1 round-trip being off by 1 second if UT1 is on a leap second. [#2077]

astropy.units

• Quantity.copy now behaves identically to ndarray.copy, and thus supports the order argument (for numpy >=1.6). [#2284]

• Composing base units into identical composite units now works. [#2382]

• Creating and composing/decomposing units is now substantially faster [#2544]

• Quantity objects now are able to be assigned NaN [#2695]

astropy.wcs

• Astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.

• Bug fixes in the projection routines: in hpxx2s [the cartesian-to-spherical operation of the HPX projection] relating to bounds checking, bug introduced at wcslib 4.20; in parx2s and molx2s`` [the cartesion-to-spherical operation of the PAR and MOL projections respectively] relating to setting the stat vector; in hpxx2s relating to implementation of the vector API; and in xphx2s relating to setting an out-of-bounds value of phi.

• In the PCO projection, use alternative projection equations for greater numerical precision near theta == 0. In the COP projection, return an exact result for theta at the poles. Relaxed the tolerance for bounds checking a little in SFL projection.

• Fix a bug allocating insufficient memory in astropy.wcs.WCS.sub [#2468]

• A new method, Wcsprm.bounds_check (corresponding to wcslib’s wcsbchk) has been added to control what bounds checking is performed by wcslib.

• WCS.to_header will now raise a more meaningful exception when the WCS information is invalid or inconsistent in some way. [#1854]

• In WCS.to_header, RESTFRQ and RESTWAV are no longer rewritten if zero. [#2468]

• In WCS.to_header, floating point values will now always be written with an exponent or fractional part, i.e. .0 being appended if necessary to achieve this. [#2468]

• If the C extension for astropy.wcs was not built or fails to import for any reason, import astropy.wcs will result in an ImportError, rather than getting obscure errors once the astropy.wcs is used. [#2061]

• When the C extension for astropy.wcs is built using a version of wscslib already present in the system, the package does not try to install wcslib headers under astropy/wcs/include. [#2536]

• Fixes an unresolved external symbol error in the astropy.wcs._wcs C extension on Microsoft Windows when built with a Microsoft compiler. [#2478]

Misc

• Running the test suite with python setup.py test now works if the path to the source contains spaces. [#2488]

• The version of ERFA included with Astropy is now v1.1.0 [#2497]

• Removed deprecated option from travis configuration and force use of wheels rather than allowing build from source. [#2576]

• The short option -n to run tests in parallel was broken (conflicts with the distutils built-in option of “dry-run”). Changed to -j. [#2566]

Other Changes and Additions

• python setup.py test –coverage will now give more accurate results, because the coverage analysis will include early imports of astropy. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get this to work when doing import astropy; astropy.test(), so the coverage keyword to astropy.test has been removed. Coverage testing now depends only on coverage.py, not pytest-cov. [#2112]

• The included version of py.test has been upgraded to 2.5.1. [#1970]

• The included version of six.py has been upgraded to 1.5.2. [#2006]

• Where appropriate, tests are now run both with and without the unicode_literals option to ensure that we support both cases. [#1962]

• Running the Astropy test suite from within the IPython REPL is disabled for now due to bad interaction between the test runner and IPython’s logging and I/O handler. For now, run the Astropy tests should be run in the basic Python interpreter. [#2684]

• Added support for numerical comparison of floating point values appearing in the output of doctests using a +FLOAT_CMP doctest flag. [#2087]

• A monkey patch is performed to fix a bug in Numpy version 1.7 and earlier where unicode fill values on masked arrays are not supported. This may cause unintended side effects if your application also monkey patches numpy.ma or relies on the broken behavior. If unicode support of masked arrays is important to your application, upgrade to Numpy 1.8 or later for best results. [#2059]

• The developer documentation has been extensively rearranged and rewritten. [#1712]

• The human_time function in astropy.utils now returns strings without zero padding. [#2420]

• The bdist_dmg command for setup.py has now been removed. [#2553]

• Many broken API links have been fixed in the documentation, and the nitpick Sphinx option is now used to avoid broken links in future. [#1221, #2019, #2109, #2161, #2162, #2192, #2200, #2296, #2448, #2456, #2460, #2467, #2476, #2508, #2509]

Version 0.3.2 (2014-05-13)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• if sep argument is specified to be a single character in sexagisimal_to_string, it now includes separators only between items [#2183]

• Ensure comparisons involving Distance objects do not raise exceptions; also ensure operations that lead to units other than length return Quantity. [#2206, #2250]

• Multiplication and division of Angle objects is now supported. [#2273]

• Fixed Angle.to_string functionality so that negative angles have the correct amount of padding when pad=True. [#2337]

• Mixing strings and quantities in the Angle constructor now works. For example: Angle(['1d', 1. * u.d]). [#2398]

• If Longitude is given a Longitude as input, use its wrap_angle by default [#2705]

astropy.cosmology

• Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]

• Be more careful about converting to floating point internally [#1815, #1818]

astropy.io.ascii

• The CDS reader in astropy.io.ascii can now handle multiple description lines in ReadMe files. [#2225]

• When reading a table with values that generate an overflow error during type conversion (e.g. overflowing the native C long type), fall through to using string. Previously this generated an exception [#2234].

• Recognize any string with one to four dashes as null value. [#1335]

astropy.io.fits

• Allow pickling of FITS_rec objects. [#1597]

• Improved behavior when writing large compressed images on OSX by removing an unnecessary check for platform architecture. [#2345]

• Fixed an issue where Astropy Table objects containing boolean columns were not correctly written out to FITS files. [#1953]

• Several other bug fixes ported from PyFITS v3.2.3 [#2368]

• Fixed a crash on Python 2.x when writing a FITS file directly to a StringIO.StringIO object. [#2463]

astropy.io.registry

• Allow readers/writers with the same name to be attached to different classes. [#2312]

astropy.io.votable

• By default, floating point values are now written out using repr rather than str to preserve precision [#2137]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed the SIP and InverseSIP models both so that they work in the first place, and so that they return results consistent with the SIP functions in astropy.wcs. [#2177]

astropy.stats

• Ensure the axis keyword in astropy.stats.funcs can now be used for all axes. [#2173]

astropy.table

• Ensure nameless columns can be printed, using ‘None’ for the header. [#2213]

astropy.time

• Fixed pickling of Time objects. [#2123]

astropy.units

• Quantity._repr_latex_() returns NotImplementedError for quantity arrays instead of an uninformative formatting exception. [#2258]

• Ensure Quantity.flat always returns Quantity. [#2251]

• Angstrom unit renders better in MathJax [#2286]

astropy.utils

• Progress bars will now be displayed inside the IPython qtconsole. [#2230]

• data.download_file() now evaluates REMOTE_TIMEOUT() at runtime rather than import time. Previously, setting REMOTE_TIMEOUT after import had no effect on the function’s behavior. [#2302]

• Progressbar will be limited to 100% so that the bar does not exceed the terminal width. The numerical display can still exceed 100%, however.

astropy.vo

• Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]

• Cone Search validation no longer raises ConeSearchError for positive RA. [#2240, #2242]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed a bug where calling astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub with WCSSUB_CELESTIAL may cause memory corruption due to underallocation of a temporary buffer. [#2350]

• Fixed a memory allocation bug in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub and astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.copy. [#2439]

Misc

• Fixes for compatibility with Python 3.4. [#1945]

• import astropy; astropy.test() now correctly uses the same test configuration as python setup.py test [#1811]

Version 0.3.1 (2014-03-04)

Bug Fixes

astropy.config

• Fixed a bug where ConfigurationItem.set_temp() does not reset to default value when exception is raised within with block. [#2117]

astropy.convolution

• Fixed a bug where _truncation was left undefined for CustomKernel. [#2016]

• Fixed a bug with _normalization when CustomKernel input array sums to zero. [#2016]

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed a bug where using == on two array coordinates wouldn’t work. [#1832]

• Fixed bug which caused len() not to work for coordinate objects and added a .shape property to get appropriately array-like behavior. [#1761, #2014]

• Fixed a bug where sexagesimal notation would sometimes include exponential notation in the last field. [#1908, #1913]

• CompositeStaticMatrixTransform no longer attempts to reference the undefined variable self.matrix during instantiation. [#1944]

• Fixed pickling of Longitude, ensuring wrap_angle is preserved [#1961]

• Allow sep argument in Angle.to_string to be empty (resulting in no separators) [#1989]

astropy.io.ascii

• Allow passing unicode delimiters when reading or writing tables. The delimiter must be convertible to pure ASCII. [#1949]

• Fix a problem when reading a table and renaming the columns to names that already exist. [#1991]

astropy.io.fits

• Ported all bug fixes from PyFITS 3.2.1. See the PyFITS changelog at https://pyfits.readthedocs.io/en/v3.2.1/ [#2056]

astropy.io.misc

• Fixed issues in the HDF5 Table reader/writer functions that occurred on Windows. [#2099]

astropy.io.votable

• The write_null_values kwarg to VOTable.to_xml, when set to False (the default) would produce non-standard VOTable files. Therefore, this functionality has been replaced by a better understanding that knows which fields in a VOTable may be left empty (only char, float and double in VOTable 1.1 and 1.2, and all fields in VOTable 1.3). The kwarg is still accepted but it will be ignored, and a warning is emitted. [#1809]

• Printing out a astropy.io.votable.tree.Table object using repr or str now uses the pretty formatting in astropy.table, so it’s possible to easily preview the contents of a VOTable. [#1766]

astropy.modeling

• Fixed bug in computation of model derivatives in LinearLSQFitter. [#1903]

• Raise a NotImplementedError when fitting composite models. [#1915]

• Fixed bug in the computation of the Gaussian2D model. [#2038]

• Fixed bug in the computation of the AiryDisk2D model. [#2093]

astropy.sphinx

• Added slightly more useful debug info for AstropyAutosummary. [#2024]

astropy.table

• The column string representation for n-dimensional cells with only one element has been fixed. [#1522]

• Fix a problem that caused MaskedColumn.__getitem__ to not preserve column metadata. [#1471, #1872]

• With Numpy prior to version 1.6.2, tables with Unicode columns now sort correctly. [#1867]

• astropy.table can now print out tables with Unicode columns containing non-ascii characters. [#1864]

• Columns can now be named with Unicode strings, as long as they contain only ascii characters. This makes using astropy.table easier on Python 2 when from __future__ import unicode_literals is used. [#1864]

• Allow pickling of Table, Column, and MaskedColumn objects. [#792]

• Fix a problem where it was not possible to rename columns after sorting or adding a row. [#2039]

astropy.time

• Fix a problem where scale conversion problem in TimeFromEpoch was not showing a useful error [#2046]

• Fix a problem when converting to one of the formats unix, cxcsec, gps or plot_date when the time scale is UT1, TDB or TCB [#1732]

• Ensure that delta_ut1_utc gets calculated when accessed directly, instead of failing and giving a rather obscure error message [#1925]

• Fix a bug when computing the TDB to TT offset. The transform routine was using meters instead of kilometers for the Earth vector. [#1929]

• Increase __array_priority__ so that TimeDelta can convert itself to a Quantity also in reverse operations [#1940]

• Correct hop list from TCG to TDB to ensure that conversion is possible [#2074]

astropy.units

• Quantity initialisation rewritten for speed [#1775]

• Fixed minor string formatting issue for dimensionless quantities. [#1772]

• Fix error for inplace operations on non-contiguous quantities [#1834].

• The definition of the unit bar has been corrected to “1e5 Pascal” from “100 Pascal” [#1910]

• For units that are close to known units, but not quite, for example due to differences in case, the exception will now include recommendations. [#1870]

• The generic and FITS unit parsers now accept multiple slashes in the unit string. There are multiple ways to interpret them, but the approach taken here is to convert “m/s/kg” to “m s-1 kg-1”. Multiple slashes are accepted, but discouraged, by the FITS standard, due to the ambiguity of parsing, so a warning is raised when it is encountered. [#1911]

• The use of “angstrom” (with a lower case “a”) is now accepted in FITS unit strings, since it is in common usage. However, since it is not officially part of the FITS standard, a warning will be issued when it is encountered. [#1911]

• Pickling unrecognized units will not raise a AttributeError. [#2047]

• astropy.units now correctly preserves the precision of fractional powers. [#2070]

• If a Unit or Quantity is raised to a floating point power that is very close to a rational number with a denominator less than or equal to 10, it is converted to a Fraction object to preserve its precision through complex unit conversion operations. [#2070]

astropy.utils

• Fixed crash in timer.RunTimePredictor.do_fit. [#1905]

• Fixed astropy.utils.compat.argparse for Python 3.1. [#2017]

astropy.wcs

• astropy.wcs.WCS, astropy.wcs.WCS.fix and astropy.wcs.find_all_wcs now have a translate_units keyword argument that is passed down to astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.fix. This can be used to specify any unsafe translations of units from rarely used ones to more commonly used ones.

  Although "S" is commonly used to represent seconds, its translation to "s" is potentially unsafe since the standard recognizes "S" formally as Siemens, however rarely that may be used. The same applies to "H" for hours (Henry), and "D" for days (Debye).

  When these sorts of changes are performed, a warning is emitted. [#1854]

• When a unit is “fixed” by astropy.wcs.WCS.fix or astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.unitfix, it now correctly reports the CUNIT field that was changed. [#1854]

• astropy.wcs.Wcs.printwcs will no longer warn that cdelt is being ignored when none was present in the FITS file. [#1845]

• astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.set is called from within the astropy.wcs.WCS constructor, therefore any invalid information in the keywords will be raised from the constructor, rather than on a subsequent call to a transformation method. [#1918]

• Fix a memory corruption bug when using astropy.wcs.Wcs.sub with astropy.wcs.WCSSUB_CELESTIAL. [#1960]

• Fixed the AttributeError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.WCS.footprint_to_file. [#1912]

• Fixed a NameError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

• Fixed a bug where named WCSes may be erroneously reported as ' ' when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

• Fixed a bug where error messages about incorrect header keywords may not be propagated correctly, resulting in a “NULL error object in wcslib” message. [#2106]

Misc

• There are a number of improvements to make Astropy work better on big endian platforms, such as MIPS, PPC, s390x and SPARC. [#1849]

• The test suite will now raise exceptions when a deprecated feature of Python or Numpy is used. [#1948]

Other Changes and Additions

• A new function, astropy.wcs.get_include, has been added to get the location of the astropy.wcs C header files. [#1755]

• The doctests in the .rst files in the docs folder are now tested along with the other unit tests. This is in addition to the testing of doctests in docstrings that was already being performed. See docs/development/testguide.rst for more information. [#1771]

• Fix a problem where import fails on Python 3 if setup.py exists in current directory. [#1877]

Version 0.3 (2013-11-20)

New Features

• General

• A top-level configuration item, unicode_output has been added to control whether the Unicode string representation of certain objects will contain Unicode characters. For example, when use_unicode is False (default):

  >>> from astropy import units as u
  >>> print(unicode(u.degree))
  deg
  

  When use_unicode is True:

  >>> from astropy import units as u
  >>> print(unicode(u.degree))
  °
  

  See handling-unicode for more information. [#1441]

• astropy.utils.misc.find_api_page is now imported into the top-level. This allows usage like astropy.find_api_page(astropy.units.Quantity). [#1779]

astropy.convolution

• New class-based system for generating kernels, replacing make_kernel. [#1255] The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution. [#1451]

astropy.coordinates

• Two classes astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude have been added. These are derived from the new Angle class and used for all longitude-like (RA, azimuth, galactic L) and latitude-like coordinates (Dec, elevation, galactic B) respectively. The Longitude class provides auto-wrapping capability and Latitude performs bounds checking.

• astropy.coordinates.Distance supports conversion to and from distance modulii. [#1472]

• astropy.coordinates.SphericalCoordinateBase and derived classes now support arrays of coordinates, enabling large speed-ups for some operations on multiple coordinates at the same time. These coordinates can also be indexed using standard slicing or any Numpy-compatible indexing. [#1535, #1615]

• Array coordinates can be matched to other array coordinates, finding the closest matches between the two sets of coordinates (see the astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_3d and astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_sky functions). [#1535]

astropy.cosmology

• Added support for including massive Neutrinos in the cosmology classes. The Planck (2013) cosmology has been updated to use this. [#1364]

• Calculations now use and return Quantity objects where appropriate. [#1237]

astropy.io.ascii

• Added support for writing IPAC format tables [#1152].

astropy.io.fits

• Added initial support for table columns containing pseudo-unsigned integers. This is currently enabled by using the uint=True option when opening files; any table columns with the correct BZERO value will be interpreted and returned as arrays of unsigned integers. [#906]

• Upgraded vendored copy of CFITSIO to v3.35, though backwards compatibility back to version v3.28 is maintained.

• Added support for reading and writing tables using the Q format for columns. The Q format is identical to the P format (variable-length arrays) except that it uses 64-bit integers for the data descriptors, allowing more than 4 GB of variable-length array data in a single table.

• Some refactoring of the table and FITS_rec modules in order to better separate the details of the FITS binary and ASCII table data structures from the HDU data structures that encapsulate them. Most of these changes should not be apparent to users (but see API Changes below).

astropy.io.votable

• Updated to support the VOTable 1.3 draft. [#433]

• Added the ability to look up and group elements by their utype attribute. [#622]

• The format of the units of a VOTable file can be specified using the unit_format parameter. Note that units are still always written out using the CDS format, to ensure compatibility with the standard.

astropy.modeling

• Added a new framework for representing and evaluating mathematical models and for fitting data to models. See “What’s New in Astropy 0.3” in the documentation for further details. [#493]

astropy.stats

• Added robust statistics functions astropy.stats.funcs.median_absolute_deviation, astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_location, and astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_midvariance. [#621]

• Added astropy.stats.funcs.signal_to_noise_oir_ccd for computing the signal to noise ratio for source being observed in the optical/IR using a CCD. [#870]

• Add axis=int option to stropy.stats.funcs.sigma_clip to allow clipping along a given axis for multidimensional data. [#1083]

astropy.table

• New columns can be added to a table via assignment to a non-existing column by name. [#726]

• Added join function to perform a database-like join on two tables. This includes support for inner, left, right, and outer joins as well as metadata merging. [#903]

• Added hstack and vstack functions to stack two or more tables. [#937]

• Tables now have a .copy method and include support for copy and deepcopy. [#1208]

• Added support for selecting and manipulating groups within a table with a database style group_by method. [#1424]

• Table read and write functions now include rudimentary support reading and writing of FITS tables via the unified reading/writing interface. [#591]

• The units and dtypes attributes and keyword arguments in Column, MaskedColumn, Row, and Table are now deprecated in favor of the single-tense unit and dtype. [#1174]

• Setting a column from a Quantity now correctly sets the unit on the Column object. [#732]

• Add remove_row and remove_rows to remove table rows. [#1230]

• Added a new Table.show_in_browser method that opens a web browser and displays the table rendered as HTML. [#1342]

• New tables can now be instantiated using a single row from an existing table. [#1417]

astropy.time

• New Time objects can be instantiated from existing Time objects (but with different format, scale, etc.) [#889]

• Added a Time.now classmethod that returns the current UTC time, similarly to Python’s datetime.now. [#1061]

• Update internal time manipulations so that arithmetic with Time and TimeDelta objects maintains sub-nanosecond precision over a time span longer than the age of the universe. [#1189]

• Use astropy.utils.iers to provide delta_ut1_utc, so that automatic calculation of UT1 becomes possible. [#1145]

• Add datetime format which allows converting to and from standard library datetime.datetime objects. [#860]

• Add plot_date format which allows converting to and from the date representation used when plotting dates with matplotlib via the matplotlib.pyplot.plot_date function. [#860]

• Add gps format (seconds since 1980-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, including leap seconds) [#1164]

• Add array indexing to Time objects [#1132]

• Allow for arithmetic of multi-element and single-element Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1081]

• Allow multiplication and division of TimeDelta objects by constants and arrays, as well as changing sign (negation) and taking the absolute value of TimeDelta objects. [#1082]

• Allow comparisons of Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1171]

• Support interaction of Time and Quantity objects that represent a time interval. [#1431]

astropy.units

• Added parallax equivalency for length-angle. [#985]

• Added mass-energy equivalency. [#1333]

• Added a new-style format method which will use format specifiers (like 0.03f) in new-style format strings for the Quantity’s value. Specifiers which can’t be applied to the value will fall back to the entire string representation of the quantity. [#1383]

• Added support for complex number values in quantities. [#1384]

• Added new spectroscopic equivalencies for velocity conversions (relativistic, optical, and radio conventions are supported) [#1200]

• The spectral equivalency now also handles wave number.

• The spectral_density equivalency now also accepts a Quantity for the frequency or wavelength. It also handles additional flux units.

• Added Brightness Temperature (antenna gain) equivalency for conversion between \(T_B\) and flux density. [#1327]

• Added percent unit, and allowed any string containing just a number to be interpreted as a scaled dimensionless unit. [#1409]

• New-style format strings can be used to set the unit output format. For example, "{0:latex}".format(u.km) will print with the latex formatter. [#1462]

• The Unit.is_equivalent method can now take a tuple. In this case, the method returns True if the unit is equivalent to any of the units listed in the tuple. [#1521]

• def_unit can now take a 2-tuple of names of the form (short, long), where each entry is a list. This allows for handling strange units that might have multiple short names. [#1543]

• Added dimensionless_angles equivalency, which allows conversion of any power of radian to dimensionless. [#1161]

• Added the ability to enable set of units, or equivalencies that are used by default. Also provided context managers for these cases. [#1268]

• Imperial units are disabled by default. [#1593, #1662]

• Added an astropy.units.add_enabled_units context manager, which allows creating a temporary context with additional units temporarily enabled in the global units namespace. [#1662]

• Unit instances now have .si and .cgs properties a la Quantity. These serve as shortcuts for Unit.to_system(cgs)[0] etc. [#1610]

astropy.vo

• New package added to support Virtual Observatory Simple Cone Search query and service validation. [#552]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed attribute error in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm (lattype->lattyp) [#1463]

• Included a new command-line script called wcslint and accompanying API for validating the WCS in a given FITS file or header. [#580]

• Upgraded included version of WCSLIB to 4.19.

astropy.utils

• Added a new set of utilities in astropy.utils.timer for analyzing the runtime of functions and making runtime predections for larger inputs. [#743]

• ProgressBar and Spinner classes can now be used directly to return generator expressions. [#771]

• Added astropy.utils.iers which allows reading in of IERS A or IERS B bulletins and interpolation in UT1-UTC.

• Added a function astropy.utils.find_api_page–given a class or object from the astropy package, this will open that class’s API documentation in a web browser. [#663]

• Data download functions such as download_file now accept a show_progress argument to suppress console output, and a timeout argument. [#865, #1258]

astropy.extern.six

• Added six for python2/python3 compatibility

• Astropy now uses the ERFA library instead of the IAU SOFA library for fundamental time transformation routines. The ERFA library is derived, with permission, from the IAU SOFA library but is distributed under a BSD license. See license/ERFA.rst for details. [#1293]

astropy.logger

• The Astropy logger now no longer catches exceptions by default, and also only captures warnings emitted by Astropy itself (prior to this change, following an import of Astropy, any warning got re-directed through the Astropy logger). Logging to the Astropy log file has also been disabled by default. However, users of Astropy 0.2 will likely still see the previous behavior with Astropy 0.3 for exceptions and logging to file since the default configuration file installed by 0.2 set the exception logging to be on by default. To get the new behavior, set the log_exceptions and log_to_file configuration items to False in the astropy.cfg file. [#1331]

API Changes

• General

• The configuration option utils.console.use_unicode has been moved to the top level and renamed to unicode_output. It now not only affects console widgets, such as progress bars, but also controls whether calling unicode on certain classes will return a string containing unicode characters.

astropy.coordinates

• The astropy.coordinates.Angle class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1006]

• The astropy.coordinates.Distance class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1472]

• All angular units are now supported, not just radian, degree and hour, but now arcsecond and arcminute as well. The object will retain its native unit, so when printing out a value initially provided in hours, its to_string() will, by default, also be expressed in hours.

• The Angle class now supports arrays of angles.

• To be consistent with units.Unit, Angle.format has been deprecated and renamed to Angle.to_string.

• To be consistent with astropy.units, all plural forms of unit names have been removed. Therefore, the following properties of astropy.coordinates.Angle should be renamed:

• radians -> radian

• degrees -> degree

• hours -> hour

• Multiplication and division of two Angle objects used to raise NotImplementedError. Now they raise TypeError.

• The astropy.coordinates.Angle class no longer has a bounds attribute so there is no bounds-checking or auto-wrapping at this level. This allows Angle objects to be used in arbitrary arithmetic expressions (e.g. coordinate distance computation).

• The astropy.coordinates.RA and astropy.coordinates.Dec classes have been removed and replaced with astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude respectively. These are now used for the components of Galactic and Horizontal (Alt-Az) coordinates as well instead of plain Angle objects.

• astropy.coordinates.angles.rotation_matrix and astropy.coordinates.angles.angle_axis now take a unit kwarg instead of degrees kwarg to specify the units of the angles. rotation_matrix will also take the unit from the given Angle object if no unit is provided.

• The AngularSeparation class has been removed. The output of the coordinates separation() method is now an astropy.coordinates.Angle. [#1007]

• The coordinate classes have been renamed in a way that remove the Coordinates at the end of the class names. E.g., ICRSCoordinates from previous versions is now called ICRS. [#1614]

• HorizontalCoordinates are now named AltAz, to reflect more common terminology.

astropy.cosmology

• The Planck (2013) cosmology will likely give slightly different (and more accurate) results due to the inclusion of Neutrino masses. [#1364]

• Cosmology class properties now return Quantity objects instead of simple floating-point values. [#1237]

• The names of cosmology instances are now truly optional, and are set to None rather than the name of the class if the user does not provide them. [#1705]

astropy.io.ascii

• In the read method of astropy.io.ascii, empty column values in an ASCII table are now treated as missing values instead of the previous treatment as a zero-length string “”. This now corresponds to the behavior of other table readers like numpy.genfromtxt. To restore the previous behavior set fill_values=None in the call to ascii.read(). [#919]

• The read and write methods of astropy.io.ascii now have a format argument for specifying the file format. This is the preferred way to choose the format instead of the Reader and Writer arguments. [#961]

• The include_names and exclude_names arguments were removed from the BaseHeader initializer, and now instead handled by the reader and writer classes directly. [#1350]

• Allow numeric and otherwise unusual column names when reading a table where the format argument is specified, but other format details such as the delimiter or quote character are being guessed. [#1692]

• When reading an ASCII table using the Table.read() method, the default has changed from guess=False to guess=True to allow auto-detection of file format. This matches the default behavior of ascii.read().

astropy.io.fits

• The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is marked “pending deprecation”. This does not mean it will be removed outright or that its functionality has changed. It will likely be replaced in the future for a function with similar, if not subtly different functionality. A better, if not slightly more verbose approach is to use pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns to create a new FITS_rec table–this has the same interface as pyfits.new_table. The difference is that it returns a plan FITS_rec array, and not an HDU instance. This FITS_rec object can then be used as the data argument in the constructors for BinTableHDU (for binary tables) or TableHDU (for ASCII tables). This is analogous to creating an ImageHDU by passing in an image array. pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns is just a simpler way of creating a FITS-compatible recarray from a FITS column specification.

• The updateHeader, updateHeaderData, and updateCompressedData methods of the CompDataHDU class are pending deprecation and moved to internal methods. The operation of these methods depended too much on internal state to be used safely by users; instead they are invoked automatically in the appropriate places when reading/writing compressed image HDUs.

• The CompDataHDU.compData attribute is pending deprecation in favor of the clearer and more PEP-8 compatible CompDataHDU.compressed_data.

• The constructor for CompDataHDU has been changed to accept new keyword arguments. The new keyword arguments are essentially the same, but are in underscore_separated format rather than camelCase format. The old arguments are still pending deprecation.

• The internal attributes of HDU classes _hdrLoc, _datLoc, and _datSpan have been replaced with _header_offset, _data_offset, and _data_size respectively. The old attribute names are still pending deprecation. This should only be of interest to advanced users who have created their own HDU subclasses.

• The following previously deprecated functions and methods have been removed entirely: createCard, createCardFromString, upperKey, ColDefs.data, setExtensionNameCaseSensitive, _File.getfile, _TableBaseHDU.get_coldefs, Header.has_key, Header.ascardlist.

• Interfaces that were pending deprecation are now fully deprecated. These include: create_card, create_card_from_string, upper_key, Header.get_history, and Header.get_comment.

• The .name attribute on HDUs is now directly tied to the HDU’s header, so that if .header['EXTNAME'] changes so does .name and vice-versa.

astropy.io.registry

• Identifier functions for reading/writing Table and NDData objects should now accept (origin, *args, **kwargs) instead of (origin, args, kwargs). [#591]

• Added a new astropy.io.registry.get_formats function for listing registered I/O formats and details about the their readers/writers. [#1669]

astropy.io.votable

• Added a new option use_names_over_ids option to use when converting from VOTable objects to Astropy Tables. This can prevent a situation where column names are not preserved when converting from a VOTable. [#609]

astropy.nddata

• The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution, and the make_kernel function has been removed. (the kernel classes should be used instead) [#1451]

astropy.stats.funcs

• For sigma_clip, the maout optional parameter has been removed, and the function now always returns a masked array. A new boolean parameter copy can be used to indicated whether the input data should be copied (copy=True, default) or used by reference (copy=False) in the output masked array. [#1083]

astropy.table

• The first argument to the Column and MaskedColumn classes is now the data array–the name argument has been changed to an optional keyword argument. [#840]

• Added support for instantiating a Table from a list of dict, each one representing a single row with the keys mapping to column names. [#901]

• The plural ‘units’ and ‘dtypes’ have been switched to ‘unit’ and ‘dtype’ where appropriate. The original attributes are still present in this version as deprecated attributes, but will be removed in the next version. [#1174]

• The copy methods of Column and MaskedColumn were changed so that the first argument is now order='C'. This is required for compatibility with Numpy 1.8 which is currently in development. [#1250]

• Comparing a column (with == or !=) to a scalar, an array, or another column now always returns a boolean Numpy array (which is a masked array if either of the arguments in the comparison was masked). This is in contrast to the previous behavior, which in some cases returned a boolean Numpy array, and in some cases returned a boolean Column object. [#1446]

astropy.time

• For consistency with Quantity, the attributes val and is_scalar have been renamed to value and isscalar, respectively, and the attribute vals has been dropped. [#767]

• The double-float64 internal representation of time is used more efficiently to enable better accuracy. [#366]

• Format and scale arguments are now allowed to be case-insensitive. [#1128]

astropy.units

• The Quantity class now inherits from the Numpy array class, and includes the following API changes [#929]:

• Using float(...), int(...), and long(...) on a quantity will now only work if the quantity is dimensionless and unscaled.

• All Numpy ufuncs should now treat units correctly (or raise an exception if not supported), rather than extract the value of quantities and operate on this, emitting a warning about the implicit loss of units.

• When using relevant Numpy ufuncs on dimensionless quantities (e.g. np.exp(h * nu / (k_B * T))), or combining dimensionless quantities with Python scalars or plain Numpy arrays 1 + v / c, the dimensionless Quantity will automatically be converted to an unscaled dimensionless Quantity.

• When initializing a quantity from a value with no unit, it is now set to be dimensionless and unscaled by default. When initializing a Quantity from another Quantity and with no unit specified in the initializer, the unit is now taken from the unit of the Quantity being initialized from.

• Strings are no longer allowed as the values for Quantities. [#1005]

• Quantities are always comparable with zero regardless of their units. [#1254]

• The exception astropy.units.UnitsException has been renamed to astropy.units.UnitsError to be more consistent with the naming of built-in Python exceptions. [#1406]

• Multiplication with and division by a string now always returns a Unit (rather than a Quantity when the string was first) [#1408]

• Imperial units are disabled by default.

astropy.wcs

• For those including the astropy.wcs C headers in their project, they should now include it as:

  #include “astropy_wcs/astropy_wcs_api.h”

  instead of:

  #include “astropy_wcs_api.h”

  [#1631]

• The --enable-legacy option for setup.py has been removed. [#1493]

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• The write() function was ignoring the fill_values argument. [#910]

• Fixed an issue in DefaultSplitter.join where the delimiter attribute was ignored when writing the CSV. [#1020]

• Fixed writing of IPAC tables containing null values. [#1366]

• When a table with no header row was read without specifying the format and using the names argument, then the first row could be dropped. [#1692]

astropy.io.fits

• Binary tables containing compressed images may, optionally, contain other columns unrelated to the tile compression convention. Although this is an uncommon use case, it is permitted by the standard.

• Reworked some of the file I/O routines to allow simpler, more consistent mapping between OS-level file modes (‘rb’, ‘wb’, ‘ab’, etc.) and the more “PyFITS-specific” modes used by PyFITS like “readonly” and “update”. That is, if reading a FITS file from an open file object, it doesn’t matter as much what “mode” it was opened in so long as it has the right capabilities (read/write/etc.) Also works around bugs in the Python io module in 2.6+ with regard to file modes.

• Fixed a long-standing issue where writing binary tables did not correctly write the TFORMn keywords for variable-length array columns (they omitted the max array length parameter of the format). This was thought fixed in an earlier version, but it was only fixed for compressed image HDUs and not for binary tables in general.

astropy.nddata

• Fixed crash when trying to multiple or divide NDData objects with uncertainties. [#1547]

astropy.table

• Using a list of strings to index a table now correctly returns a new table with the columns named in the list. [#1454]

• Inequality operators now work properly with Column objects. [#1685]

astropy.time

• Time scale and format attributes are now shown when calling dir() on a Time object. [#1130]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed assignment to string-like WCS attributes on Python 3. [#956]

astropy.units

• Fixed a bug that caused the order of multiplication/division of plain Numpy arrays with Quantities to matter (i.e. if the plain array comes first the units were not preserved in the output). [#899]

• Directly instantiated CompositeUnits were made printable without crashing. [#1576]

Misc

• Fixed various modules that hard-coded sys.stdout as default arguments to functions at import time, rather than using the runtime value of sys.stdout. [#1648]

• Minor documentation fixes and enhancements [#922, #1034, #1210, #1217, #1491, #1492, #1498, #1582, #1608, #1621, #1646, #1670, #1756]

• Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when running the test suite on systems with platform names containing non-ASCII characters. [#1698]

Other Changes and Additions

• General

• Astropy now follows the PSF Code of Conduct. [#1216]

• Astropy’s test suite now tests all doctests in inline docstrings. Support for running doctests in the reST documentation is planned to follow in v0.3.1.

• Astropy’s test suite can be run on multiple CPUs in parallel, often greatly improving runtime, using the --parallel option. [#1040]

• A warning is now issued when using Astropy with Numpy < 1.5–much of Astropy may still work in this case but it shouldn’t be expected to either. [#1479]

• Added automatic download/build/installation of Numpy during Astropy installation if not already found. [#1483]

• Handling of metadata for the NDData and Table classes has been unified by way of a common MetaData descriptor–it allows instantiating an object with metadata of any mapping type, and subsequently prevents replacing the mapping stored in the .meta attribute (only direct updates to that object are allowed). [#1686]

astropy.coordinates

• Angles containing out of bounds minutes or seconds (e.g. 60) can be parsed–the value modulo 60 is used with carry to the hours/minutes, and a warning is issued rather than raising an exception. [#990]

astropy.io.fits

• The new compression code also adds support for the ZQUANTIZ and ZDITHER0 keywords added in more recent versions of this FITS Tile Compression spec. This includes support for lossless compression with GZIP. (#198) By default no dithering is used, but the SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_1 and SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_2 methods can be enabled by passing the correct constants to the quantize_method argument to the CompImageHDU constructor. A seed can be manually specified, or automatically generated using either the system clock or checksum-based methods via the dither_seed argument. See the documentation for CompImageHDU for more details.

• Images compressed with the Tile Compression standard can now be larger than 4 GB through support of the Q format.

• All HDUs now have a .ver .level attribute that returns the value of the EXTVAL and EXTLEVEL keywords from that HDU’s header, if the exist. This was added for consistency with the .name attribute which returns the EXTNAME value from the header.

• Then Column and ColDefs classes have new .dtype attributes which give the Numpy dtype for the column data in the first case, and the full Numpy compound dtype for each table row in the latter case.

• There was an issue where new tables created defaulted the values in all string columns to ‘0.0’. Now string columns are filled with empty strings by default–this seems a less surprising default, but it may cause differences with tables created with older versions of PyFITS or Astropy.

astropy.io.misc

• The HDF5 reader can now refer to groups in the path as well as datasets; if given a group, the first dataset in that group is read. [#1159]

astropy.nddata

• NDData objects have more helpful, though still rudimentary __str__` and ``__repr__ displays. [#1313]

astropy.units

• Added ‘cycle’ unit. [#1160]

• Extended units supported by the CDS formatter/parser. [#1468]

• Added unicode an LaTeX symbols for liter. [#1618]

astropy.wcs

• Redundant SCAMP distortion parameters are removed with SIP distortions are also present. [#1278]

• Added iterative implementation of all_world2pix that can be reliably inverted. [#1281]

Version 0.2.5 (2013-10-25)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed incorrect string formatting of Angles using precision=0. [#1319]

• Fixed string formatting of Angles using decimal=True which ignored the precision argument. [#1323]

• Fixed parsing of format strings using appropriate unicode characters instead of the ASCII - for minus signs. [#1429]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a crash in the IPAC table reader when the include/exclude_names option is set. [#1348]

• Fixed writing AASTex tables to honor the tabletype option. [#1372]

astropy.io.fits

• Improved round-tripping and preservation of manually assigned column attributes (TNULLn, TSCALn, etc.) in table HDU headers. (Note: This issue was previously reported as fixed in Astropy v0.2.2 by mistake; it is not fixed until v0.3.) [#996]

• Fixed a bug that could cause a segfault when trying to decompress an compressed HDU whose contents are truncated (due to a corrupt file, for example). This still causes a Python traceback but better that than a segfault. [#1332]

• Newly created CompImageHDU HDUs use the correct value of the DEFAULT_COMPRESSION_TYPE module-level constant instead of hard-coding “RICE_1” in the header.

• Fixed a corner case where when extra memory is allocated to compress an image, it could lead to unnecessary in-memory copying of the compressed image data and a possible memory leak through Numpy.

• Fixed a bug where assigning from an mmap’d array in one FITS file over the old (also mmap’d) array in another FITS file failed to update the destination file. Corresponds to PyFITS issue 25.

• Some miscellaneous documentation fixes.

astropy.io.votable

• Added a warning for when a VOTable 1.2 file contains no RESOURCES elements (at least one should be present). [#1337]

• Fixed a test failure specific to MIPS architecture caused by an errant floating point warning. [#1179]

astropy.nddata.convolution

• Prevented in-place modification of the input arrays to convolve(). [#1153]

astropy.table

• Added HTML escaping for string values in tables when outputting the table as HTML. [#1347]

• Added a workaround in a bug in Numpy that could cause a crash when accessing a table row in a masked table containing dtype=object columns. [#1229]

• Fixed an issue similar to the one in #1229, but specific to unmasked tables. [#1403]

astropy.units

• Improved error handling for unparsable units and fixed parsing CDS units without mantissas in the exponent. [#1288]

• Added a physical type for spectral flux density. [#1410]

• Normalized conversions that should result in a scale of exactly 1.0 to round off slight floating point imprecisions. [#1407]

• Added support in the CDS unit parser/formatter for unusual unit prefixes that are nonetheless required to be supported by that convention. [#1426]

• Fixed the parsing of sqrt() in unit format strings which was returning unit ** 2 instead of unit ** 0.5. [#1458]

astropy.wcs

• When passing a single array to the wcs transformation functions, (astropy.wcs.Wcs.all_pix2world, etc.), its second dimension must now exactly match the number of dimensions in the transformation. [#1395]

• Improved error message when incorrect arguments are passed to WCS.wcs_world2pix. [#1394]

• Fixed a crash when trying to read WCS from FITS headers on Python 3.3 in Windows. [#1363]

• Only headers that are required as part of the WCSLIB C API are installed by the package, per request of system packagers. [#1666]

Misc

• Fixed crash when the COLUMNS environment variable is set to a non-integer value. [#1291]

• Fixed a bug in ProgressBar.map where multiprocess=True could cause it to hang on waiting for the process pool to be destroyed. [#1381]

• Fixed a crash on Python 3.2 when affiliated packages try to use the astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_* functions. [#1256]

• Fixed a minor path normalization issue that could occur on Windows in astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_filename. [#1444]

• Fixed an annoyance where configuration items intended only for testing showed up in users’ astropy.cfg files. [#1477]

• Prevented crashes in exception logging in unusual cases where no traceback is associated with the exception. [#1518]

• Fixed a crash when running the tests in unusual environments where sys.stdout.encoding is None. [#1530]

• Miscellaneous documentation fixes and improvements [#1308, #1317, #1377, #1393, #1362, #1516]

Other Changes and Additions

• Astropy installation now requests setuptools >= 0.7 during build/installation if neither distribute or setuptools >= 0.7 is already installed. In other words, if import setuptools fails, ez_setup.py is used to bootstrap the latest setuptools (rather than using distribute_setup.py to bootstrap the now obsolete distribute package). [#1197]

• When importing Astropy from a source checkout without having built the extension modules first an ImportError is raised rather than a SystemExit exception. [#1269]

Version 0.2.4 (2013-07-24)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed the angle parser to support parsing the string “1 degree”. [#1168]

astropy.cosmology

• Fixed a crash in the comoving_volume method on non-flat cosmologies when passing it an array of redshifts.

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed a bug that prevented saving changes to the comment symbol when writing changes to a table. [#1167]

astropy.io.fits

• Added a workaround for a bug in 64-bit OSX that could cause truncation when writing files greater than 2^32 bytes in size. [#839]

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed incorrect reading of tables containing multiple <RESOURCE> elements. [#1223]

astropy.table

• Fixed a bug where Table.remove_column and Table.rename_column could cause a masked table to lose its masking. [#1120]

• Fixed bugs where subclasses of Table did not preserver their class in certain operations. [#1142]

• Fixed a bug where slicing a masked table did not preserve the mask. [#1187]

astropy.units

• Fixed a bug where the .si and .cgs properties of dimensionless Quantity objects raised a ZeroDivisionError. [#1150]

• Fixed a bug where multiple subsequent calls to the .decompose() method on array quantities applied a scale factor each time. [#1163]

Misc

• Fixed an installation crash that could occur sometimes on Debian/Ubuntu and other *NIX systems where pkg_resources can be installed without installing setuptools. [#1150]

• Updated the distribute_setup.py bootstrapper to use setuptools >= 0.7 when installing on systems that don’t already have an up to date version of distribute/setuptools. [#1180]

• Changed the version.py template so that Astropy affiliated packages can (and they should) use their own cython_version.py and utils._compiler modules where appropriate. This issue only pertains to affiliated package maintainers. [#1198]

• Fixed a corner case where the default config file generation could crash if building with matplotlib but not Sphinx installed in a virtualenv. [#1225]

• Fixed a crash that could occur in the logging module on systems that don’t have a default preferred encoding (in particular this happened in some versions of PyCharm). [#1244]

• The Astropy log now supports passing non-string objects (and calling str() on them by default) to the logging methods, in line with Python’s standard logging API. [#1267]

• Minor documentation fixes [#582, #696, #1154, #1194, #1212, #1213, #1246, #1252]

Other Changes and Additions

astropy.cosmology

• Added a new Plank13 object representing the Plank 2013 results. [#895]

astropy.units

• Performance improvements in initialization of Quantity objects with a large number of elements. [#1231]

Version 0.2.3 (2013-05-30)

Bug Fixes

astropy.time

• Fixed inaccurate handling of leap seconds when converting from UTC to UNIX timestamps. [#1118]

• Tightened required accuracy in many of the time conversion tests. [#1121]

Misc

• Fixed a regression that was introduced in v0.2.2 by the fix to issue #992 that was preventing installation of Astropy affiliated packages that use Astropy’s setup framework. [#1124]

Version 0.2.2 (2013-05-21)

Bug Fixes

astropy.io

• Fixed issues in both the fits and votable sub-packages where array byte order was not being handled consistently, leading to possible crashes especially on big-endian systems. [#1003]

astropy.io.fits

• When an error occurs opening a file in fitsdiff the exception message will now at least mention which file had the error.

• Fixed a couple cases where creating a new table using TDIMn in some of the columns could cause a crash.

• Slightly refactored how tables containing variable-length array columns are handled to add two improvements: Fixes an issue where accessing the data after a call to the astropy.io.fits.getdata convenience function caused an exception, and allows the VLA data to be read from an existing mmap of the FITS file.

• Fixed a bug on Python 3 where attempting to open a non-existent file on Python 3 caused a seemingly unrelated traceback.

• Fixed an issue in the tests that caused some tests to fail if Astropy is installed with read-only permissions.

• Fixed a bug where instantiating a BinTableHDU from a numpy array containing boolean fields converted all the values to False.

• Fixed an issue where passing an array of integers into the constructor of Column() when the column type is floats of the same byte width caused the column array to become garbled.

• Fixed inconsistent behavior in creating CONTINUE cards from byte strings versus unicode strings in Python 2–CONTINUE cards can now be created properly from unicode strings (so long as they are convertible to ASCII).

• Fixed a bug in parsing HIERARCH keywords that do not have a space after the first equals sign (before the value).

• Prevented extra leading whitespace on HIERARCH keywords from being treated as part of the keyword.

• Fixed a bug where HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters was mistakenly marked as invalid during header validation along with an ancillary issue where the Header.index() method id not work correctly with HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters.

• Disallowed assigning NaN and Inf floating point values as header values, since the FITS standard does not define a way to represent them in. Because this is undefined, the previous behavior did not make sense and produced invalid FITS files. [#954]

• Fixed an obscure issue that can occur on systems that don’t have flush to memory-mapped files implemented (namely GNU Hurd). [#968]

astropy.io.votable

• Stopped deprecation warnings from the astropy.io.votable package that could occur during setup. [#970]

• Fixed an issue where INFO elements were being incorrectly dropped when occurring inside a TABLE element. [#1000]

• Fixed obscure test failures on MIPS platforms. [#1010]

astropy.nddata.convolution

• Fixed an issue in make_kernel() when using an Airy function kernel. Also removed the superfluous ‘brickwall’ option. [#939]

astropy.table

• Fixed a crash that could occur when adding a row to an empty (rowless) table with masked columns. [#973]

• Made it possible to assign to one table row from the value of another row, effectively making it easier to copy rows, for example. [#1019]

astropy.time

• Added appropriate __copy__ and __deepcopy__ behavior; this omission caused a seemingly unrelated error in FK5 coordinate separation. [#891]

astropy.units

• Fixed an issue where the isiterable() utility returned True for quantities with scalar values. Added an __iter__ method for the Quantity class and fixed isiterable() to catch false positives. [#878]

• Fixed previously undefined behavior when multiplying a unit by a string. [#949]

• Added ‘time’ as a physical type–this was a simple omission. [#959]

• Fixed issues with pickling unit objects so as to play nicer with the multiprocessing module. [#974]

• Made it more difficult to accidentally override existing units with a new unit of the same name. [#1070]

• Added several more physical types and units that were previously omitted, including ‘mass density’, ‘specific volume’, ‘molar volume’, ‘momentum’, ‘angular momentum’, ‘angular speed’, ‘angular acceleration’, ‘electric current’, ‘electric current density’, ‘electric field strength’, ‘electric flux density’, ‘electric charge density’, ‘permittivity’, ‘electromagnetic field strength’, ‘radiant intensity’, ‘data quantity’, ‘bandwidth’; and ‘knots’, ‘nautical miles’, ‘becquerels’, and ‘curies’ respectively. [#1072]

Misc

• Fixed a permission error that could occur when running astropy.test() on Python 3 when Astropy is installed as root. [#811]

• Made it easier to filter warnings from the convolve() function and from Quantity objects. [#853]

• Fixed a crash that could occur in Python 3 when generation of the default config file fails during setup. [#952]

• Fixed an unrelated error message that could occur when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without having build the extension modules first. This issue was claimed to be fixed in v0.2.1, but the fix itself had a bug. [#971]

• Fixed a crash that could occur when running the build_sphinx setup command in Python 3. [#977]

• Added a more helpful error message when trying to run the setup.py build_sphinx command when Sphinx is not installed. [#1027]

• Minor documentation fixes and restructuring. [#935, #967, #978, #1004, #1028, #1047]

Other Changes and Additions

• Some performance improvements to the astropy.units package, in particular improving the time it takes to import the sub-package. [#1015]

Version 0.2.1 (2013-04-03)

Bug Fixes

astropy.coordinates

• Fixed encoding errors that could occur when formatting coordinate objects in code using from __future__ import unicode_literals. [#817]

• Fixed a bug where the minus sign was dropped when string formatting dms coordinates with -0 degrees. [#875]

astropy.io.fits

• Properly supports the ZQUANTIZ keyword used to support quantization level–this includes working support for lossless GZIP compression of images.

• Fixed support for opening gzipped FITS files in a writeable mode. [#256]

• Added a more helpful exception message when trying to read invalid values from a table when the required TNULLn keyword is missing. [#309]

• More refactoring of the tile compression handling to work around a potential memory access violation that was particularly prevalent on Windows. [#507]

• Fixed an integer size mismatch in the compression module that could affect 32-bit systems. [#786]

• Fixed malformatting of the TFORMn keywords when writing compressed image tables (they omitted the max array length parameter from the variable-length array format).

• Fixed a crash that could occur when writing a table containing multi- dimensional array columns from an existing file into a new file.

• Fixed a bug in fitsdiff that reported two header keywords containing NaN as having different values.

astropy.io.votable

• Fixed links to the astropy.io.votable documentation in the VOTable validator output. [#806]

• When reading VOTables containing integers that are out of range for their column type, display a warning rather than raising an exception. [#825]

• Changed the default string format for floating point values for better round-tripping. [#856]

• Fixed opening VOTables through the Table.read() interface for tables that have no names. [#927]

• Fixed creation of VOTables from an Astropy table that does not have a data mask. [#928]

• Minor documentation fixes. [#932]

astropy.nddata.convolution

• Added better handling of inf values to the convolve_fft family of functions. [#893]

astropy.table

• Fixed silent failure to assign values to a row on multiple columns. [#764]

• Fixed various buggy behavior when viewing a table after sorting by one of its columns. [#829]

• Fixed using numpy.where() with table indexing. [#838]

• Fixed a bug where opening a remote table with Table.read() could cause the entire table to be downloaded twice. [#845]

• Fixed a bug where MaskedColumn no longer worked if the column being masked is renamed. [#916]

astropy.units

• Added missing capability for array Quantitys to be initializable by a list of Quantitys. [#835]

• Fixed the definition of year and lightyear to be in terms of Julian year per the IAU definition. [#861]

• “degree” was removed from the list of SI base units. [#863]

astropy.wcs

• Fixed TypeError when calling WCS.to_header_string(). [#822]

• Added new method WCS.all_world2pix for converting from world coordinates to pixel space, including inversion of the astrometric distortion correction. [#1066, #1281]

Misc

• Fixed a minor issue when installing with ./setup.py develop on a fresh git clone. This is likely only of interest to developers on Astropy. [#725]

• Fixes a crash with ImportError: No module named 'astropy.version' when running setup.py from a source checkout for the first time on OSX with Python 3.3. [#820]

• Fixed an installation issue where running ./setup.py install or when installing with pip the .astropy directory gets created in the home directory of the user running the command. The user’s .astropy directory should only be created when they use Astropy, not when they install it. [#867]

• Fixed an exception when creating a ProgressBar with a “total” of 0. [#752]

• Added better documentation of behavior that can occur when trying to import the astropy package from within a source checkout without first building the extension modules. [#795, #864]

• Added link to the installation instructions in the README. [#797]

• Catches segfaults in xmllint which can occur sometimes and is otherwise out of our control. [#803]

• Minor changes to the documentation template. [#805]

• Fixed a minor exception handling bug in download_file(). [#808]

• Added cleanup of any temporary files if an error occurs in download_file(). [#857]

• Filesystem free space is checked for before attempting to download a file with download_file(). [#858]

• Fixed package data locating to work across symlinks–required to work with some OS packaging layouts. [#827]

• Fixed a bug when building Cython extensions where hidden files containing .pyx extensions could cause the build to crash. This can be an issue with software and filesystems that autogenerate hidden files. [#834]

• Fixed bug that could cause a “script” called README.rst to be installed in a bin directory. [#852]

• Fixed some miscellaneous and mostly rare reference leaks caught by cpychecker. [#914]

Other Changes and Additions

• Added logo and branding for Windows binary installers. [#741]

• Upgraded included version libexpat to 2.1.0. [#781]

• ~25% performance improvement in unit composition/decomposition. [#836]

• Added previously missing LaTeX formatting for L_sun and R_sun. [#841]

• ConfigurationItems now have a more useful and informative __repr__ and improved documentation for how to use them. [#855]

• Added a friendlier error message when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without first building the extension modules inplace. [#864]

• py.test now outputs more system information for help in debugging issues from users. [#869]

• Added unit definitions “mas” and “uas” for “milliarcsecond” and “microarcsecond” respectively. [#892]

Version 0.2 (2013-02-19)

New Features

astropy.coordinates

• This new subpackage contains a representation of celestial coordinates, and provides a wide range of related functionality. While fully-functional, it is a work in progress and parts of the API may change in subsequent releases.

astropy.cosmology

• Update to include cosmologies with variable dark energy equations of state. (This introduces some API incompatibilities with the older Cosmology objects).

• Added parameters for relativistic species (photons, neutrinos) to the astropy.cosmology classes. The current treatment assumes that neutrinos are massless. [#365]

• Add a WMAP9 object using the final (9-year) WMAP parameters from Hinshaw et al. 2013. It has also been made the default cosmology. [#629, #724]

• astropy.table I/O infrastructure for custom readers/writers implemented. [#305]

• Added support for reading/writing HDF5 files [#461]

• Added support for masked tables with missing or invalid data [#451]

• New astropy.time sub-package. [#332]

• New astropy.units sub-package that includes a class for units (astropy.units.Unit) and scalar quantities that have units (astropy.units.Quantity). [#370, #445]

  This has the following effects on other sub-packages:

• In astropy.wcs, the wcs.cunit list now takes and returns astropy.units.Unit objects. [#379]

• In astropy.nddata, units are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#382]

• In astropy.table, units on columns are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#380]

• In astropy.constants, constants are now stored as astropy.units.Quantity objects. [#529]

astropy.io.ascii

• Improved integration with the astropy.table Table class so that table and column metadata (e.g. keywords, units, description, formatting) are directly available in the output table object. The CDS, DAOphot, and IPAC format readers now provide this type of integrated metadata.

• Changed to using astropy.table masked tables instead of NumPy masked arrays for tables with missing values.

• Added SExtractor table reader to astropy.io.ascii [#420]

• Removed the Memory reader class which was used to convert data input passed to the write function into an internal table. Instead write instantiates an astropy Table object using the data input to write.

• Removed the NumpyOutputter as the output of reading a table is now always a Table object.

• Removed the option of supplying a function as a column output formatter.

• Added a new strip_whitespace keyword argument to the write function. This controls whether whitespace is stripped from the left and right sides of table elements before writing. Default is True.

• Fixed a bug in reading IPAC tables with null values.

• Generalized I/O infrastructure so that astropy.nddata can also have custom readers/writers [#659]

astropy.wcs

• From updating the underlying wcslib 4.16:

• When astropy.wcs.WCS constructs a default coordinate representation it will give it the special name “DEFAULTS”, and will not report “Found one coordinate representation”.

Other Changes and Additions

• A configuration file with all options set to their defaults is now generated when astropy is installed. This file will be pulled in as the users’ astropy configuration file the first time they import astropy. [#498]

• Astropy doc themes moved into astropy.sphinx to allow affiliated packages to access them.

• Added expanded documentation for the astropy.cosmology sub-package. [#272]

• Added option to disable building of “legacy” packages (pyfits, vo, etc.).

• The value of the astronomical unit (au) has been updated to that adopted by IAU 2012 Resolution B2, and the values of the pc and kpc constants have been updated to reflect this. [#368]

• Added links to the documentation pages to directly edit the documentation on GitHub. [#347]

• Several updates merged from pywcs into astropy.wcs [#384]:

• Improved the reading of distortion images.

• Added a new option to choose whether or not to write SIP coefficients.

• Uses the relax option by default so that non-standard keywords are allowed. [#585]

• Added HTML representation of tables in IPython notebook [#409]

• Rewrote CFITSIO-based backend for handling tile compression of FITS files. It now uses a standard CFITSIO instead of heavily modified pieces of CFITSIO as before. Astropy ships with its own copy of CFITSIO v3.30, but system packagers may choose instead to strip this out in favor of a system-installed version of CFITSIO. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 169. [#318]

• Moved astropy.config.data to astropy.utils.data and re-factored the I/O routines to separate out the generic I/O code that can be used to open any file or resource from the code used to access Astropy-related data. The ‘core’ I/O routine is now get_readable_fileobj, which can be used to access any local as well as remote data, supports caching, and can decompress gzip and bzip2 files on-the-fly. [#425]

• Added a classmethod to astropy.coordinates.coordsystems.SphericalCoordinatesBase that performs a name resolve query using Sesame to retrieve coordinates for the requested object. This works for any subclass of SphericalCoordinatesBase, but requires an internet connection. [#556]

• astropy.nddata.convolution removed requirement of PyFFTW3; uses Numpy’s FFT by default instead with the added ability to specify an FFT implementation to use. [#660]

Bug Fixes

astropy.io.ascii

• Fixed crash when pprinting a row with INDEF values. [#511]

• Fixed failure when reading DAOphot files with empty keyword values. [#666]

astropy.io.fits

• Improved handling of scaled images and pseudo-unsigned integer images in compressed image HDUs. They now work more transparently like normal image HDUs with support for the do_not_scale_image_data and uint options, as well as scale_back and save_backup. The .scale() method works better too. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 88.

• Permits non-string values for the EXTNAME keyword when reading in a file, rather than throwing an exception due to the malformatting. Added verification for the format of the EXTNAME keyword when writing. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 96.

• Added support for EXTNAME and EXTVER in PRIMARY HDUs. That is, if EXTNAME is specified in the header, it will also be reflected in the .name attribute and in fits.info(). These keywords used to be verboten in PRIMARY HDUs, but the latest version of the FITS standard allows them. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 151.

• HCOMPRESS can again be used to compress data cubes (and higher-dimensional arrays) so long as the tile size is effectively 2-dimensional. In fact, compatible tile sizes will automatically be used even if they’re not explicitly specified. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 171.

• Fixed a bug that could cause a deadlock in the filesystem on OSX when reading the data from certain types of FITS files. This only occurred when used in conjunction with Numpy 1.7. [#369]

• Added support for the optional endcard parameter in the Header.fromtextfile() and Header.totextfile() methods. Although endcard=False was a reasonable default assumption, there are still text dumps of FITS headers that include the END card, so this should have been more flexible. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 176.

• Fixed a crash when running fitsdiff on two empty (that is, zero row) tables. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 178.

• Fixed an issue where opening a FITS file containing a random group HDU in update mode could result in an unnecessary rewriting of the file even if no changes were made. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 179.

• Fixed a crash when generating diff reports from diffs using the ignore_comments options. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 181.

• Fixed some bugs with WCS distortion paper record-valued keyword cards:

• Cards that looked kind of like RVKCs but were not intended to be were over-permissively treated as such–commentary keywords like COMMENT and HISTORY were particularly affected. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 183.

• Looking up a card in a header by its standard FITS keyword only should always return the raw value of that card. That way cards containing values that happen to valid RVKCs but were not intended to be will still be treated like normal cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.

• Looking up a RVKC in a header with only part of the field-specifier (for example “DP1.AXIS” instead of “DP1.AXIS.1”) was implicitly treated as a wildcard lookup. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.

• Fixed a crash when diffing two FITS files where at least one contains a compressed image HDU which was not recognized as an image instead of a table. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 187.

• Fixed a bug where opening a file containing compressed image HDUs in ‘update’ mode and then immediately closing it without making any changes caused the file to be rewritten unnecessarily.

• Fixed two memory leaks that could occur when writing compressed image data, or in some cases when opening files containing compressed image HDUs in ‘update’ mode.

• Fixed a bug where ImageHDU.scale(option='old') wasn’t working at all–it was not restoring the image to its original BSCALE and BZERO values.

• Fixed a bug when writing out files containing zero-width table columns, where the TFIELDS keyword would be updated incorrectly, leaving the table largely unreadable.

• Fixed a minor string formatting issue.

• Fixed bugs in the backwards compatibility layer for the CardList.index and CardList.count methods. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 190.

• Improved __repr__ and text file representation of cards with long values that are split into CONTINUE cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 193.

• Fixed a crash when trying to assign a long (> 72 character) value to blank (‘’) keywords. This also changed how blank keywords are represented–there are still exactly 8 spaces before any commentary content can begin; this may affect the exact display of header cards that assumed there could be fewer spaces in a blank keyword card before the content begins. However, the current approach is more in line with the requirements of the FITS standard. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 194.

astropy.io.votable

• The Table class now maintains a single array object which is a Numpy masked array. For variable-length columns, the object that is stored there is also a Numpy masked array.

• Changed the pedantic configuration option to be False by default due to the vast proliferation of non-compliant VO Tables. [#296]

• Renamed astropy.io.vo to astropy.io.votable.

astropy.table

• Added a workaround for an upstream bug in Numpy 1.6.2 that could cause a maximum recursion depth RuntimeError when printing table rows. [#341]

astropy.wcs

• Updated to wcslib 4.15 [#418]

• Fixed a problem with handling FITS headers on locales that do not use dot as a decimal separator. This required an upstream fix to wcslib which is included in wcslib 4.14. [#313]

• Fixed some tests that could fail due to missing/incorrect logging configuration–ensures that tests don’t have any impact on the default log location or contents. [#291]

• Various minor documentation fixes [#293 and others]

• Fixed a bug where running the tests with the py.test command still tried to replace the system-installed pytest with the one bundled with Astropy. [#454]

• Improved multiprocessing compatibility for file downloads. [#615]

• Fixed handling of Cython modules when building from a source checkout of a tagged release version. [#594]

• Added a workaround for a bug in Sphinx that could occur when using the :tocdepth: directive. [#595]

• Minor VOTable fixes [#596]

• Fixed how setup.py uses distribute_setup.py to prevent possible VersionConflict errors when an older version of distribute is already installed on the user’s system. [#616, #640]

• Changed use of log.warn in the logging module to log.warning since the former is deprecated. [#624]

Version 0.1 (2012-06-19)

• Initial release.