The following describes the most significant changes which have
occurred in the AST library between versions V3.2 and V3.3:
- Options have been added to the SkyFrameSkyFrame class which allows the
origin
of celestial coordinates to be moved to any specified point. See the new
attributes SkyRef, SkyRefIsSkyRefIs, SkyRefP and AlignOffsetAlignOffset.
- An option has been added to the FitsChanFitsChan class which allows extra
Frames representing cartesian projection plane coordinates (“intermediate
world coordinates” in the parlance of FITS-WCS) to be created when
reading
WCS information from a foreign FITS header. This option is controlled by
a new attribute called IwcIwc.
- The FitsChan class which been modified to interpret FITS-WCS CAR
projection headers correctly if the longitude reference pixel (CRPIX) is
very large.
- The FITS-AIPS++ encoding in the FitsChan class now recognised
spectral axes if they conform to the AIPS convention in which the
spectral axis is descirbed by a CTYPE keyword od the form "AAAA-BBB"
where “AAAA” is one of FREQ, VELO or FELO, and “BBB” is one of LSR, LSD,
HEL or OBS. Such spectral axes can be both read and written.
- The FitsChan class now has a FITS-AIPS++ encoding which represents
WCS information using FITS header cards recognised by the AIPS++ project.
Support for spectral axes is identical to the FITS-AIPS encoding.
- The organisation of the AST distribution and the commands for
building it have been changed. Whereas AST used to be built and installed
with
./mk build; ./mk install
, it now builds using the more standard
idiom ./configure; make; make install
. The installation location is
controlled by the --prefix
argument to ./configure (as is usual
for other packages which use this scheme). Note that the INSTALL environment
variable now has a different meaning to that which it had
before, and it should generally be unset. Also, there is no need to
set the SYSTEM variable.
- Shared libraries are now installed in the same directory as the
static libraries. In addition, links to sharable libraries are installed
with names which include version information, and “libtool libraries”
are also installed (see
http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual.html).
- The
ast_dev
script has been removed. Instead, the location of
the AST include files should be specified using the -I option when
compiling.