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astropy v5.1 Release Notes

Release Date: 2022-05-23 // 10 months ago

  • 🆕 New Features

    astropy.coordinates

    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 ~astropy.time.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 ~astropy.time.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 ~astropy.time.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]


Previous changes from v5.0.4

  • 🐛 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]