What’s New in Photutils 2.2?

Here we highlight some of the new functionality of the 2.2 release. In addition to these changes, Photutils 2.2 includes several smaller improvements and bug fixes, which are described in the full Changelog.

Converting Aperture Objects to Region Objects

A new aperture_to_region function was added to convert an Aperture object to a regions.Region or regions.Regions object. Because a regions.Region object can only have one position, a regions.Regions object will be returned if the input aperture has more than one position. Otherwise, a regions.Region object will be returned.

The regions.Region.write() and regions.Regions.write() methods can be used to write the region(s) to a file.

Segmentation Image Outlines as Regions Objects

A new to_regions() method was added to convert the outlines of the source segments to a regions.Regions object. The regions.Regions object contains a list of regions.PolygonPixelRegion objects, one for each source segment. The regions.Regions object can be written to a file using the regions.Region.write() method.

Raw Radial Profile

New data_radius and data_profile attributes were added to the RadialProfile class for calculating the raw radial profile. These attributes return the radii and values of the data points within the maximum radius defined by the input radii.

Pixel-based Aperture theta Units

The theta attribute of EllipticalAperture, EllipticalAnnulus, RectangularAperture, and RectangularAnnulus apertures is now always returned as an angular Quantity object.