What’s New in Photutils 1.7?

Here we highlight some of the new functionality of the 1.7 release. In addition to these major changes, Photutils 1.7 includes a large number of smaller improvements and bug fixes, which are described in the full Changelog.

New Profiles Subpackage

A new photutils.profiles subpackage was added containing tools for computing radial profiles and curves of growth:

• RadialProfile

• CurveOfGrowth

Converting SegmentationImage segments to polygons

The SegmentationImage class now has a polygons attribute, which returns a list of Shapely polygons representing each source segment. It also now has a to_patches and a plot_patches method, which returns or plots, respectively, a list of matplotlib.patches.Polygon objects. These features require that both the Rasterio and Shapely optional dependencies are installed.

ApertureStats local background

The ApertureStats local_bkg keyword can now be input as a scalar value, which will be broadcast for apertures with multiple positions. This can be useful to avoid loading large memory-mapped images into memory if the background level is constant.

Performance Improvements

A number of significant performance improvements have been made:

• aperture_photometry() and do_photometry()

• area_overlap()

• GriddedPSFModel

• make_source_mask()