Changes Introduced in V1.8-8

The following describes the most significant changes which occurred in the AST library between versions V1.8-7 and V1.8-8:

  1. A bug has been fixed in the FitsChanFitsChan class which could cause problems when creating a FrameSetFrameSet from a FITS header containing WCS information stored in the form of Digitised Digitised Sky Survey (DSS) keywords. These problems only occurred for DSS fields in the southern hemisphere, and resulted in pixel positions being mapped to sky positions close to the corresponding northern hemispshere field.

  2. A new method called astBoundingBoxastBoundingBox has been added to the PlotPlot class. This method returns the bounding box of the previous graphical output produced by a Plot method.

  3. A new attribute called InvisibleInvisible has been added to the Plot class which suppresses the graphical output normally produced by Plot methods. All the calculations needed to produce the normal output are still performed however, and so the bounding box returned by the new astBoundingBox method is still usable.

  4. Bugs have been fixed related to the appearance of graphical output produced by the Plot class. These bugs were to do with the way in which graphical elements relating to a specific axis (e.g. Colour(axis1), etc.) interacted with the corresponding generic element (e.g. Colour(axes), etc.).