SunPy 0.6 Released#

I am very happy to tell you that the long in the works 0.6.0 release of the SunPy library has arrived. This release has been ‘in the oven’ for well over a year, and is full of rather major changes.

The major changes in this release are:

  • Most functions throughout the SunPy code base now expect Astropy Quantity objects, and return Astropy Quantity objects.

  • Python 2.6 support has ended, we do not expect this release to work under Python 2.6.

  • Sample data has been removed from SunPy but helpers for downloading sample data have been added to sunpy.data.

  • TimeRange has a new property based API, e.g. start and end are now properties.

  • SunPy colormaps are now registered with matplotlib, allowing their use from imshow and similar functions after the import of sunpy.cm.

  • Solar rotation calculation functionality has been added, along with functionality to de-rotate MapCubes.

While there have been lots of changes, it is the move to Astropy Units throughout the code base that will require most users to update their code, if you wish to learn more about Astropy Units see: https://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/units/

You can install this release using either pip or conda. If you have a scientific python environment already configured, run:

pip install sunpy

or:

pip install --upgrade sunpy

if you have anaconda you need to add the sunpy and astropy channels to your conda config:

conda config --add channels sunpy --add channels astropy

and then run:

conda install sunpy

for more information about installing sunpy see our installation documentation: https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/tutorial/installation.html

This release consists of 1,341 commits from 29 different people and 13 new contributors!

The people who have contributed to this release are:

Stuart Mumford
Daniel Ryan
Steven Christe
Jack Ireland
Brigitta Sipocz *
Asish Panda
Andrew Inglis
Albert Y. Shih
Rishabh Sharma
David Perez-Suarez
Rajul Srivastava
Andrew Leonard
Ruben De Visscher *
Dumindu Buddhika *
Goran Cetusic *
Jongyeob Park *
Chloé Guennou *
Ishtyaq Habib *
Nabil Freij
Simon Liedtke
Abigail Stevens *
Alex Hamilton *
Ambar Mehrotra *
Erik M. Bray *
Jaylen Wimbish *
Juan Camilo Buitrago-Casas *
Larry Manley
Norbert Gyenge
Rishabh Mishra *

Happy Pythoning, Stuart Mumford