Gnuastro 0.16 released

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

I am happy to announce the 16th official release of GNU Astronomy
Utilities (Gnuastro version 0.16).

Gnuastro is an official GNU package, consisting of various
command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and
analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic
command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full
list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general
tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the
links below respectively:

https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html

For a complete review of the new/changed features in this release,
please see [1] below (also available in the 'NEWS' file within the
source code tarball).

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

  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz    (3.7MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.16.tar.gz    (5.9MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.16.tar.gz.sig (833B)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz.sig (833B)

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed). Just note that the
SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding
that most checksum tools default to.

fe1f84bf1be270f1a62091e9a5f89bb94b182154  gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz
B4hftfYuyc7x3I6aEJ2SQlkp6x7zOOrPz/bK2koGuR8  gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz
1ae00673648fe8db5630f1de9d70b49fadb42d7d  gnuastro-0.16.tar.gz
kMEdJbsFrRNxDLX4EXntgXNgikJv3/2LIEWGLV/e4i0  gnuastro-0.16.tar.gz

For this release, Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani, Natáli D. Anzanello,
Sepideh Eskandarlou, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Vladimir Markelov and Zahra
Sharbaf directly contributed to the source of Gnuastro, I am very
grateful to all of them. I should also thank Alejandro Serrano
Borlaff, Fernando Buitrago, Mark Calabretta, Zohreh Ghaffari, Giulia
Golini, Leslie Hunt, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Matthias Kluge, Juan Miro,
Juan Molina Tobar, Markus Schaney, Zahra Sharbaf, Vincenzo Testa,
Ignacio Trujillo and Aaron Watkins for their very good suggestions or
bug reports that have been implemented in Gnuastro 0.16.

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

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.8
  Autoconf 2.71
  Automake 1.16.4
  Help2man 1.48.5
  ImageMagick 7.1.0-9
  Gnulib v0.1-4944-g7fc3219bc
  Autoconf archives v2021.02.19-29-g0fbee2a

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

Best wishes,
Mohammad

--
Researcher (tenure track)
Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA),
Plaza San Juan 1, Planta 2, Teruel 44001, Spain





[1] Noteworthy changes in release 0.16 (library 14.0.0)

** New features

  Book:
   - New section added to ConvertType's documentation for annotating the
     PDF output images with coordinates on the edges of the images, or
     tangential size at certain redshift. This is done using the PGFPlots
     package of LaTeX, directly with the same fonts and graphical settings
     as your paper/slide, while being in vector graphics quality, and not
     requiring hundreds of dependencies (only LaTeX's minimal install with
     PGFPlots is necessary with Gnuastro).
   - New section to describe the precedence of Table operators in one call
     to Table. Since the number of operations on table columns/rows has
     greatly increased in the last few versions, knowing this precedence
     can minimize the number of calls to Table.
   - The section on reverse polish notation (used in Arithmetic, for
     images, and column arithmetic in Table) has been edited and extended
     to be more useful for a new user.
   - Due to the great expansion of the number of operators in the
     Arithmetic program and Column Arithmetic in the table program, the
     "Arithmetic operators" section of the book has now grouped similar
     operators in sub-sections to greatly help in finding a certain option.

  Arithmetic:
   - New operands (also available in Table's column arithmetic, the
     distance conversion operators were suggested by Markus Schaney):
     - box-around-ellipse: width and height of the box covering an ellipse.
     - au-to-pc: Convert Astronomical Units (AUs) to Parsecs (PCs).
     - pc-to-au: Convert Parsecs (PCs) to Astronomical Units (AUs).
     - ly-to-pc: Convert Light-years (LYs) to Parsecs (PCs).
     - pc-to-ly: Convert Parsecs (PCs) to Light-years (LYs).
     - ly-to-au: Convert Light-years (LYs) to Astronomical Units (AUs).
     - au-to-ly: Convert Astronomical Units (AUs) to Light-years (LYs).

  CosmicCalculator:
   - A warning is printed if the requested redshift is lower than 0.007
     (corresponding to ~30Mpc in Plank 2018 cosmology). Because at these
     scales the peculiar velocity of galaxies may be significant compared
     to the Hubble flow (which is the basis of the calculations here). The
     warning can be suppressed with the '--quiet' option. This was
     suggested by Ignacio Trujillo.

  MakeCatalog:
   --areaerror: spatial resolution of image specified by user, used in
     estimating the surface brightness error.
   --sberror: error in measuring the surface brightness (mag/arcsec^2).

  MakeProfiles:
   - New type of profile showing the azimuthal angle (in degrees, along the
     elliptical circumference of fixed radius) of each pixel. In
     combination with the radial distance profile, you can now create
     complex features in polar coordinates, such as tidal tails or tidal
     shocks (using the Arithmetic program to mix the radius and azimuthal
     angle through a function to create your desired features). Implemented
     after discussions with Fernando Buitrago and Matthias Kluge.

  Match:
   - When called with '--notmatched --outcols=AAA,BBB', Match will append
     non-matching rows of second table into first table's rows (for columns
     'AAA' and 'BBB' in example above, which are assumed to exist in both
     inputs, with same numeric datatype). This allows easy/clean merging of
     two catalogs that may have matching objects into one catalog without
     repetition. See description of '--outcols' in the Match manual for
     more. This feature was proposed by Juan Molina Tobar and Leslie Hunt.

  Sort-by-night (installed script)
   --stdintimeout: new option to set internal delay time for input from
     pipes (standard input). This is not for inputs to the script (which
     should always be files), but for the script's internal pipes.

  Statistics:
   --quantofmean: the quantile of the mean of the input dataset. this is a
     very good statistic to measure skewness in a distribution, see the
     description of this option in the book for more.

  Library:
   - Arithmetic macros: GAL_ARITHMETIC_OP_BOX_AROUND_ELLIPSE
   - gal_wcs_write_wcsstr: wrapper of wcshdo of WCSLIB to simplify generic
     access to that low-level operation (has some extra sanity checks).
   - gal_units_au_to_pc: Convert Astronomical Units to Parsecs.
   - gal_units_pc_to_au: Convert Parsecs to Astronomical Units.
   - gal_units_ly_to_pc: Convert Light-years to Parsecs.
   - gal_units_pc_to_ly: Convert Parsecs to Light-years.
   - gal_units_ly_to_au: Convert Light-years to Astronomical Units.
   - gal_units_au_to_ly: Convert Astronomical Units to Light-years.

** Removed features

   Nothing has been removed in this release.

** Changed features

  All programs:
   --stdintimeout: default value changed from 0.1 seconds to 1.5 seconds to
     avoid too many crashes when command before the pipe takes longer (thus
     needing a manual change of this value).

  MakeProfiles:
   - The default output suffix (when no '--output' is given) is now
     '_profiles.fits'. Until now, when no output name was given,
     MakeProfiles just replaced the suffix with '.fits' (effectively
     assuming the input is a plain-text file). As a result, if the input
     catalog was a FITS file, it would be automatically written-over
     (causing an error: bug #60989).

  Match:
   - The two '--notmatched' and '--outcols' can be called together (to
     create a single catalog that appends the non-matching rows of second
     table with the rows of the first. Until this version, this would cause
     an error.

  Table
   - Column concatenation (adding columns from other files) is now done
     before all row selection or row re-ording operations (if
     called). Until now, adding columns from other files was done after all
     row selection or re-ordering, but this was not too practically useful.
   - Column arithmetic operators:
     - 'wcs-to-img' new name for old 'wcstoimg' operator. The new
       unit-conversion operators generally have a '-to-' between the units
       to help in readability. So to avoid confusion, this operator has
       also been changed.
    - 'img-to-wcs' new name for old 'imgtowcs' operator (see description of
      'wcs-to-img' above).

  Library
   - gal_fits_key_write_filename: now has 'quiet' argument to avoid
     printing a warning.

** Bugs fixed
  bug #60725: MakeCatalog doesn't put comment on --halfsumsb column.
  bug #60776: Radial profile script not using standard deviation image,
              fixed by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60778: Brightness error not NaN when all STD pixels are blank,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60826: Arithmetic won't delete existing file with tofile operators.
  bug #60881: Query segmentation fault when NED is called without a 
dataset.
  bug #60901: sort-by-night crash during make check due to stdintimeout,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60903: Increasing value of stdintimeout not effective beyond 
1000000,
              reported by Zahra Sharbaf.
  bug #60909: WCS coordinate conversion not working with TPV distortion,
              fixed with the help of Mark Calabretta.
  bug #60923: Standard deviation calculation giving NaN values due to
              floating point errors, found and fixed by Natáli Anzanello.
  bug #60958: Warning on long filename not written in FITS keyword printed
              even when '--quiet' is called, found by Raúl Infante-Sainz.
  bug #60989: MakeProfiles deletes input fits catalog when no output name
              specified.
  bug #60999: No content check when plain-text table doesn't have metadata.
  bug #61007: Crash due to CFITSIO 4.0.0 version format change, reported by
              Vincenzo Testa and Zohreh Ghaffari.
  bug #61108: Plain text table metadata ignored when numeric data type was
              not understood, reported by Sepideh Eskandarlou.
  bug #61128: Radial profile: --instd and --stdhdu error when space used
              before value, found and fixed by Sepideh Eskandarlou.
  bug #61192: BuildProgram custom program linking problems on Debian-based
              OSs, reported by Raúl Infante-Sainz.
  bug #61244: Sum operator in arithmetic ignoring floating point images
              with blank values, found and reported by Giulia Golini and
              Raúl Infante-Sainz.
  bug #61287: Two "switch" blocks miss "break" in MakeCatalog when setting
              output column information, found and fixed by Vladimir
              Markelov.
  bug #61293: MakeCatalog not properly initializing the '--minvy' column
              when parsing clumps, found and fixed by Vladimir Markelov.





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

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

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

  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz

If the command above doesn't work, you have to un-compress and un-pack
it with two separate commands (or use a pipe to feed the output of the
first into the second: `lzip -cd gnuastro-0.6.tar.lz | tar -xf -'):

  $ lzip -d gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz
  $ tar xf gnuastro-0.16.tar





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

  gpg --verify gnuastro-0.16.tar.lz.sig

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

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 71E899012D174B66

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.