Subsections

Older Changes

Version 3.40

* The facilities anafast and smoothing now support pixel-based quadrature weights. Introduction of the supporting nside2npweights, unfold_weightsfile, get_healpix_weight_file, get_healpix_pixel_weight_file.
* The facilities anafast, median_filter, smoothing, and ud_grade test the value of the POLCCONV FITS keyword when reading a polarized map, and interpret the polarization accordingly, as described in the note on POLCCONV in The HEALPix Primer.
* median_filter faster by moving an internal array from heap to stack; does not crash anymore when dealing with empty data sets; slightly different output when median is computed over an even number of pixels $n\ge 100$, sorted in [1,n], the output is d(n/2) instead of (d(n/2)+d(n/2+1))/2 previously. Result remains d(n/2+1) for odd n.

Version 3.31

* Bug correction in input_map routine for reading of polarized multi-HDU cut sky FITS files;
* Introduction of winfiledir_* and windowfile_* qualifiers in alteralm facility.

Version 3.30

* anafast now produces nine spectra (TT, EE, BB, TE, TB, EB, ET, BT and BE), instead of six previously, when analyzing two polarized maps
* CFITSIO version 3.20 (August 2009) or more now required

Version 3.20

* HEALPix-F90 routines and facilities can now also be compiled with the free Fortran95 compiler g95 (www.g95.org)
* a separate build directory is used to store the objects, modules, ... produced during the compilation of the source codes
* improved handling of long FITS keywords, now producing FITS files fully compatible with the PyFITS and Astropy (https://www.astropy.org) Python libraries
* improved FITS file parsing in generate_beam, affecting the external B(l) reading in the F90 facilities alteralm, synfast, sky_ng_sim, smoothing.

Version 3.11

* libsharp C routines used for Spherical Harmonics Transforms and introduced in HEALPix 3.10 can now be compiled with any gcc version.

Version 3.10

* all Fortran facilities now support most of cfitsio's ”Extended File Name Syntax” features, allowing the reading and processing of an arbitrary HDU and table column out of remote, compressed FITS files. For example, setting
infile = ftp://url/file.fits.gz[extn][col colname]
in anafast will download the FITS file file.fits.gz from url, uncompress it, open the HDU (extension) featuring keyword EXTNAME=extn, or the one with 1-based rank number extn, read the table column with TTYPE*=colname out of it and will analyze it.
It is also possible to perform a remote anafast analysis of a Planck Legacy Archive (PLA) sky map named map.fits via the PLA AIO Subsystem by simply setting infile=https://pla.esac.esa.int/pla/aio/product-action?MAP.MAP_ID=map.fits as input map file.
* yet faster synfast, anafast, smoothing thanks to libsharp routines1.
Note that some gcc versions (4.4.1 to 4.4.6) crash with an internal compiler error during compilation of libsharp. The problem has been fixed in gcc 4.4.7, 4.5.*, 4.6.*, 4.7.* and newer versions and was not present in versions 4.2.* and 4.3.*.

Changes up to release 3.00

Version 3.00

* all input FITS files can now be compressed (with a .gz, .Z, .z, or .zip extension) and/or remotely located (with a ftp:// or http:// prefix). Version 3.14 (March 2009) or newer of CFITSIO is required for HEALPix 3.0.
* introduction of process_mask facility to compute the angular distance of valid pixels to the closest invalid pixels for a input binary mask,
* sky_ng_sim now allows the computation of the spatial derivatives of the non Gaussian map being produced, and the output of the $a_{\ell m}$ coefficients of that map,
* anafast now allows the pro/down-grading of the input mask to match the resolution of the map(s) being analyzed.

Version 2.20

* faster synfast, anafast, smoothing thanks to libpsht routines.
* most facilities can handle maps with Nside> 8192, ie more than 805,306,368 pixels.
See ”F90 Subroutines Overview” for details.

Version 2.14

* In synfast facility, a numerical bug affecting the accuracy of the Stokes parameter derivatives $\partial X/\partial\theta$, $\partial^2 X/(\partial\theta\partial\phi\sin\theta)$, $\partial^2 X/\partial \theta^2$, for X=Q,U has been corrected. See this appendix for details.

Version 2.10

* The anafast facility can now compute the cross-correlations of two different maps.
* The sky_ng_sim facility (Rocha et al, 2005), to produce non-Gaussian CMB temperature maps, has been added.

Version 2.00

* faster implementation of $a_{\ell m}$ related facilities, generalization of OpenMP parallelization, and availability of MPI parallelized routines (see mpi_* routines in Fortran90 Subroutines Overview document).
* introduction of alteralm facility to modify and/or rotate the spherical harmonics coefficients $a_{\ell m}$ and greater flexibility for constraining $a_{\ell m}$ in synfast
* single and double precision implementation of most facilities (see Input and Output Precision page [*])

Version 3.50, 2018-12-10