October Release Announcements#

Today we have a quadruple release announcement for you! It’s been a very busy week in SunPy land getting both the core and ndcube releases over the line; I hope you enjoy them!

sunpy 3.1#

The next scheduled release of the sunpy core package actually comes a week early according to our release calendar, but we couldn’t resist bringing you this end of month release party.

The 3.1 release contains many new features and improvements, having merged 145 pull requests from 16 people including 8 new contributors.

Some of the highlights from the What’s New in SunPy 3.1? page are:

  • Increased in-situ data support

  • A new limb drawing function

  • A new WISPR map source

  • Propagating solar-surface coordinates in time

  • Convenient reprojection of maps

  • JSOC keyword filtering with Fido

  • Arithmetic operations with maps

My personal favourites being the new limb drawing function and the reproject_to method on all maps.

ndcube 2.0#

Even more excitingly, for me personally, is the long awaited 2.0 release of ndcube.

ndcube is the sunpy sponsored package for working with multi-dimensional data with an associated WCS object. For an introduction to ndcube and motivation for the 2.0 rework see An introduction to ndcube.

We started working on ndcube 2.0 back in 2019 when we had Yash Sharma do the initial work of porting the code base to use the APE 14 APIs as his Google Summer of Code project. Little did any of us think that it would take over two years from that point to hit the final release.

The road to ndcube 2.0 has been long and arduous; all involved have put in a lot of work and what we have made is something that I am personally very proud of. ndcube 2.0 would not have happened without Dan Ryan, who as the co-maintainer for ndcube has spent many hours on video calls with me designing APIs, and many more hours besides working out problems you would only encounter in one in a million WCS objects! I would also be remiss if I didn’t specifically thank the DKIST data center who have, by paying for my time, funded a lot of the development work on ndcube 2.0, even when the scope increased beyond their direct requirements.

I hope that many packages will start using ndcube 2.0 as the base for their code. There are already many who have helped to shape the release such as the DKIST User Tools, specutils and sunraster as well as others I know are in the works.

For all the gory details of the changes in ndcube 2.0 see the changelog.

pfsspy 1.0#

The SunPy-affiliated potential field source surface extrapolation package pfsspy maintained by David Stansby has had a 1.0 release, which includes promises of API stability. You can read about all the changes in the changelog.

aiapy 0.6#

The SunPy-affiliated aiapy package, which provides tools for working with SDO/AIA data and is maintained by the AIA instrument team, has a new 0.6 release which includes support for sunpy core 3.1. In addition to a number of bug fixes, v0.6 also includes the ability to calculate uncertainties on AIA images via the estimate_error function. A complete list of changes is available in the changelog.