Galpy

=================

- Added support for holding multiple objects in an Orbit instance,
with efficient handling of multiple objects and parallelized
integration and action-angle-related functions. Orbit instances can
now have arbitrary shapes. Full re-write of Orbit class (PR 384).

- Added support for 1D orbit integration in C (PR 354).

- Added a (JSON) list with the phase-space coordinates of known
objects (mainly globular clusters and dwarf galaxies) for easy
Orbit.from_name initialization. For ease of use,
Orbit.from_name also supports tab completion for known objects in
this list in IPython/Jupyter (PR 392).

- Added the galpy.potentials.mwpotentials module with various
Milky-Way-like potentials. Currently included are MWPotential2014,
McMillan17 for the potential from McMillan (2017), models 1 through
4 from Dehnen & Binney (1998), and the three models from Irrgang et
al. (2013). See PR 395.

- Added potential.to_amuse to create an AMUSE
(http://www.amusecode.org) representation of any galpy potential,
allowing galpy potentials to be used as external gravitational
fields in AMUSE N-body simulations (398).

- Added potential.toVerticalPotential to convert any 3D potential to a
1D potential at a given (R,phi) [generalizes RZToverticalPotential
to non-axi potentials; RZToverticalPotential retained for backwards
compatibility].

- Re-wrote potential.MovingObjectPotential to allow general mass
distributions for the moving object, implemented now as standard
galpy potentials rather than with separate ForceSoftening class,
which has now been removed (355). Initialization keywords for
potential.MovingObjectPotential have changed because of this in a
non-backwards-compatible manner.

- Added support to combine Potential instances or lists thereof
through the addition operator. E.g., pot= pot1+pot2+pot3 to create
the combined potential of the three component potentials
(pot1,pot2,pot3). Each of these components can be a combined
potential itself. As before, combined potentials are simply lists of
potentials, so this is simply an alternative (and perhaps more
intuitive) way to create these lists (369).

- Added support to adjust the amplitude of a Potential instance
through multiplication of the instance by a number or through
division by a number. E.g., pot= 2.*pot1 returns a Potential instance
that is the same as pot1, except that the amplitude is twice
larger. Similarly, pot= pot1/2. decreases the amplitude by a factor
of two. This is useful, for example, to quickly change the mass of a
potential. Only works for Potential instances, not for lists of
Potential instances (369).

- Added support to plot arbitrary combinations of the basic Orbit
attributes by giving them as an expression (e.g.,
orb.plot(d2='vR*R/r+vz*z/r')); requires the numexpr package.

- Switched default Sun's vertical height zo parameter for Orbit
initialization to be the value of 20.8 pc from Bennett & Bovy
(2019).

- Added IsothermalDiskPotential, the one-dimensional potential of an
isothermal self-gravitating disk (sech^2 profile).

- Added NumericalPotentialDerivativesMixin, a Mixin class to add
numerically-computed forces and second derivatives to any Potential
class, allowing new potentials to be implemented quickly by only
implementing the potential itself and obtaining all forces and
second derivatives numerically.

- Added nemo_accname and nemo_accpars for the HernquistPotential,
allowing it to be converted to NEMO.

- DehnenSmoothWrapperPotential can now decay rather than grow a
potential by setting ``decay=True``.

- DehnenBarPotential and SpiralArmsPotential method now work for array
inputs (PR 388, by webbjj).

- Allow transformations of custom coordinate systems (positions
and proper motions) to ICRS (ra,dec) and (pmra,pmdec).

- Allow orbit integrations to be KeyboardInterrupted on Windows as well
(362 by Henry Leung)

- Add Python and C implementation of Dormand-Prince 8(5,3) integrator
(363 by Henry Leung)

- Added function galpy.util.bovy_conversion.get_physical to obtain the
ro and vo parameters describing the conversion between physical and
internal units as a dictionary. This works for any galpy object or
lists of such objects.

- Improved efficiency of requesting an integrated orbit at the exact
times at which it was integrated (~10x faster now).

=================

- Added ChandrasekharDynamicalFrictionForce, an implementation of
dynamical friction based on the classical Chandrasekhar formula
(with recent tweaks from the literature to better represent the
results from N-body simulations).

- Added galpy.df.jeans with tools for Jeans modeling. Currently only
contains the functions sigmar and sigmalos to calculate the velocity
dispersion in the radial or line-of-sight direction using the
spherical Jeans equation in a given potential, density profile, and
anisotropy profile (anisotropy can be radially varying).

- Added CorotatingRotationWrapperPotential to galpy.potential: a
wrapper to make a pattern wind up over time such that it is always
corotating (for use in simulating corotating spiral structure like
that of Grand, Kawata, Baba, et al.)

- Added GaussianAmplitudeWrapperPotential to galpy.potential: a
wrapper to modulate the amplitude of any Potential instance with a
Gaussian (growing from zero to the full amplitude and dying off
again).

- Added a general class EllipsoidalPotential that is a superclass for
implementing potentials with densities that are constant on
ellipsoids (functions of m^2 = x^2 + y^2/b^2 + z^2/c^2). Also
implemented in C. Implementing new types of ellipsoidal potentials
now only requires three simple functions to be defined: the density
as a function of m, its derivative with respect to m, and its
integral with respect to m^2 (348).

- Added PerfectEllipsoidPotential, the potential of a perfect
ellipsoid (de Zeeuw 1985): this is a fully integrable
(Staeckel-type), triaxial potential.

- Re-implemented TwoPowerTriaxialPotential and special cases
TriaxialHernquistPotential, TriaxialJaffePotential, and
TriaxialNFWPotential using the general EllipsoidalPotential class.

- Allow nested lists of Potential instances everywhere where lists of
Potential instances were previously allowed; allow easy adding of
components (e.g., a bar) to previously defined potentials (which may
be lists themselves): new_pot= [pot,bar_pot].

- Add from_name class method of Orbit, which allows Orbit instances to
be initialized using the coordinates of a named object found in SIMBAD.

- Add rguiding method of Orbit, to compute the guiding-center radius
of an orbit. Also added Lz method to easily obtain the z-component
of the angular momentum for different types of orbits.

- Defined Orbit initialization without any arguments (or, more
generally, without specifying the vxvv initial phase-space input) to
return an Orbit instances representing the Sun. Can therefore setup
an Orbit representing the Sun's as o= Orbit().

- Allow Orbit instances to be initialized using a SkyCoord with
position and velocity data, with optional Galactocentric frame
specification as part of the SkyCoord that is correctly propagated
to the Orbit instance. Requires astropy>3

- Added rtide and ttensor methods/functions for Potentials: tidal
radius and tidal tensor.

- Added surfdens and evaluateSurfaceDensities method and function,
respectively, for Potentials for evaluating the surface density up
to a given z.

- Added potentials SphericalShellPotential and RingPotential for the
potential of a spherical shell and a circular ring,
respectively. Useful for talking about Newton's theorems.

- Switched default solarmotion parameter for Orbit initialization to
be schoenrich (for the Schoenrich, Binney, & Dehnen 2010 solar
motion wrt the LSR).

- Added Potential method r2deriv and function evaluater2derivs to
evaluate the second derivative wrt the spherical radius. Also added
convenience functions evaluatephi2derivs and evaluateRphiderivs.

- Added quasiisothermaldf method sampleV_interpolate that allows
velocities at different positions to be sampled efficiently
(quasiisothermaldf.sampleV only works for a single position). See PR
350.

- Add warnings/verbose configuration parameter to set level of
verbosity of non-crucial warnings (like: "Using C implementation to
integrate orbits").

- If astropy version > 3, Orbit.SkyCoord returns a SkyCoord object
that includes the velocity information and the Galactocentric frame
used by the Orbit instance.

- Tweaked coordinate-transformations to Galactocentric coordinates to
be consistent with astropy's.

- Introduced general Force class of which Potential and
DissipativeForce inherit, the former for forces that derive from a
potential, the latter for those that do not.

- Introduced DissipativeForce, a superclass for all dissipative
forces. ChandrasekharDynamicalFrictionForce is currently the only
class that inherits from DissipativeForce.

- Re-arranged the package structure to better comply with the standard
layout. All subpackages (e.g., galpy.potential) are now contained in
subdirectories of the same name (e.g., galpy/potential/ rather than
the old galpy/potential_src/).

- Made the code fully compilable on Windows with MSVC and test Windows
builds automatically on appveyor (333).

==================

- Added a fast and precise method for approximating an orbit's
eccentricity, peri- and apocenter radii, and maximum height above
the midplane using the Staeckel approximation (see Mackereth & Bovy
2018); available as an actionAngle method EccZmaxRperiRap and for
Orbit instances through the e, rperi, rap, and zmax methods.

- Added support for potential wrappers---classes that wrap existing
potentials to modify their behavior (307). See the documentation on
potentials and the potential API for more information on these.

- Added DehnenSmoothWrapperPotential, a potential wrapper to smoothly
grow a gravitational potential (e.g., a bar) following Dehnen
(2000).

- Added SolidBodyRotationWrapperPotential, a potential wrapper to make
a gravitational potential rotate around the z axis with a fixed,
uniform pattern speed.

- Added DiskSCFPotential, a class that implements general
density/potential pairs for disk potentials by combining Kuijken &
Dubinski (1995)'s trick for turning a separable disk density
[rho(R,z) = \Sigma(R) x h(z)] into a ellipsoidal-ish density, with
the SCF basis-function-expansion approach of Hernquist & Ostriker
(1992) for solving for the ellipsoidal-ish density's potential. This
is a fully general Poisson solver (i.e., any density can be
represented in this way).

- Added SoftenedNeedleBarPotential, a simple potential for a bar that
consists of a needle softened by a Miyamoto-Nagai kernel (Long &
Murali 1992).

- Added FerrersPotential, a class that implements the potential for
triaxial ellipsoids (Binney & Tremaine 2008, Ch 2.5) with an option
to give a pattern speed to the ellipsoid.

- Added SpiralArmsPotential, a class that implements the spiral arms
potential from Cox and Gomez
(2002). https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0207635v1 (#305)

- Added the Henon & Heiles (1964) potential

- Added an Orbit method to display an animation of an integrated orbit
in jupyter notebooks (Orbit.animate).

- Added galpy.df.schwarzschilddf, the simple Schwarzschild
distribution function for a razor-thin disk.

- Upgraded LogarithmicHaloPotential to allow it to be a triaxial
potential.

- Upgraded DehnenBarPotential to a 3D potential following Monari et
al. (2016) (304).

- Generalized CosmphiDiskPotential to allow for a break radius within
which the radial dependence of the potential changes from R^p to
R^-p; also added C implementation of CosmphiDiskPotential.

- Changed default method for computing actions, frequencies, and
angles for Orbit instances to be the Staeckel approximation with an
automatically-estimated delta parameter.

- Added an option to the estimateDeltaStaeckel function to facilitate the
return of an estimated delta parameter at every phase space point passed,
rather than returning a median of the estimate at each point.

- Generalized actionAngleStaeckel to allow for different focal lengths
delta for different phase-space points. Also allowed the order of
the Gauss-Legendre integration to be specified (default: 10, which
is good enough when using actionAngleStaeckel to compute approximate
actions etc. for an axisymmetric potential).

- Allow transformations of (ra,dec) and (pmra,pmdec) to custom
coordinate systems.

- Allow plotting of the spherical radius in Orbit.plot

- Allow plotting of arbitrary user-supplied functions of time in
Orbit.plot, Orbit.plot3d, and Orbit.animate.

- Added conversion to and from oblate spheroidal coordinates. Also
added conversion of velocities to the momenta in oblate or prolate
spheroidal coordinates (but not the other way around).

- Made SCFPotential compatible with GSL v2.

- Orbit methods now all return a scalar when called with a single
time (see 247 and 294).

- Added a warning whenever the orbit-integration method that is used
is different from the requested one (for when C integration falls
back onto Python; see 286).

- Turn off changing the seaborn default plot configuration to that
preferred by this code's maintainer; can be turned back on by
specifying ``seaborn-bovy-defaults = True`` in the configuration
file (see documentation). Old configuration files will be
automatically updated to add this option (but remain otherwise the
same).

- Added button to code examples in the documentation that copies the
examples to the user's clipboard for easy pasting into a Python
interpreter.

- Switched test suite from nose to pytest (303).

- quasiisothermaldf.tilt return unit switched from deg to rad.

- streamdf.misalignment return unit switched from deg to rad.

- evolveddiskdf.vertexdev return unit switched from deg to rad.

- In quasiisothermaldf.py, the following prefactors were added
to the following functions: [nsigma^2/2] --> pvT(),
[nsigma/2] --> pvRvT(), [nsigma/2] --> pvTvz(),
[vTmax/2] --> pvRvz(). This change was required to correctly
account for the Gauss-Legendre integration limits.

==================

- Added support for providing inputs to all initializations, methods,
and functions as Quantities with units and for providing outputs as
astropy Quantities. See pull request 258 and the documentation for
full details.

- Added TwoPowerTriaxialPotential, a set of triaxial potentials with
iso-density contours that are arbitrary, similar, coaxial ellipsoids
whose 'radial' density is a (different) power-law at small and large
radii: 1/m^alpha/(1+m)^beta-alpha (the triaxial generalization of
TwoPowerSphericalPotential, with flattening in the density rather
than in the potential, see Merritt & Fridman 1996, Binney & Tremaine
2008). These include triaxial Hernquist and NFW potentials. Includes
fast C implementations that allow efficient orbit integration in
these potentials (<~5 ms / orbit).

- Added SCFPotential, a class that implements general
density/potential pairs through the basis expansion approach to
solving the Poisson equation of Hernquist & Ostriker (1992). Also
implemented functions to compute the coefficients for a given
density function.

- Implemented galpy.actionAngle.actionAngleIsochroneApprox (Bovy 2014)
for the general case of a time-independent potential, allowing
action-angle coordinates to be computed for triaxial
potentials. Previously, this module only supported axisymmetric
potentials. Also allow the maximum number of terms in the expansion
to be set object-wide and allow a fixed time-step to be used in the
necessary orbit integration.

- Added an (experimental) interface to Binney & McMillan's TorusMapper
code for computing positions and velocities for given actions and
angles. See the installation instructions for how to properly
install this.

- Re-defined the amplitude parameters of a few potentials to allow for
easier setups with amplitudes provided as Quantities with
units. This is the case for FlattenedPowerPotential,
PowerSphericalPotential, and PowerSphericalPotentialwCutoff,
CosmphiDiskPotential, LopsidedDiskPotential, and
EllipticalDiskPotential.

- Added a module for modeling the effect of a subhalo impact on a
tidal stream (galpy.df.streamgapdf); see Sanders, Bovy, & Erkal
(2016). Also includes the fast methods for computing the density
along the stream and the stream track for a perturbed stream from
Bovy, Erkal, & Sanders (2016).

- Added functions to galpy.df.streamdf to compute the length of the
stream, the density along the stream quickly (in various
coordinates, including custom sky coordinates), to compute the
probability p(freq_parallel,angle_parallel), and to estimate the
number of encounters with DM subhalos. Also allow the stream track
to be computing using the new actionAngleTorus (this last addition
is still very experimental).

- Added PseudoIsothermalPotential, a standard pseudo-isothermal-sphere
potential.

- Added KuzminDiskPotential, a potential represented by a razor thin
disk

- Allow transformations to custom sets of sky coordinates in
galpy.util.bovy_coords.

- Added the spherical radius as an Orbit method.

- Added the spherical-radial force as a Potential method (rforce) and
function (evaluaterforces).

- Support for flipping the velocities of an orbit in-place (useful for
backwards integration).

- quasiisothermaldf input ro replaced by refr to avoid clash with ro
that specifies units (see above).

- Properly intercept CTRL-C (SIGINT) signals during orbit integration
in C, allowing long orbit integrations to be interrupted without
killing an entire Python session.

- Internally use astropy.coordinates transformations to transform
between (ra,dec) and (l,b). Can be tuned using the astropy-coords
configuration parameter. Also allow general epochs for the (ra,dec)
specification.

==================

- Added Python 3 support: in particular, Python 3.3 and 3.4 are now
supported; earlier 3.* may also work, but haven't been
tested. Python 2 and 3 are supported using a single common codebase.

- Added SnapshotRZPotential and InterpSnapshotRZPotential potential
classes: these can be used to get a frozen snapshot of the potential
of an N-body simulation into galpy. SnapshotRZPotential directly
calculates the potential and forces using direct summation;
InterpSnapshotRZPotential builds an interpolation table (it's a
subclass of interpRZPotential and can be used in the same way). This
code was mainly written by Rok Roskar.

- Added KuzminKutuzovStaeckelPotential, a Staeckel potential that can
be used to approximate the potential of a disk galaxy (see Batsleer
& Dejonghe 1994).

- Added MN3ExponentialDiskPotential that gives the approximation to a
radially-exponential disk potential as three Miyamoto-Nagai disks
from Smith et al. (2015; arXiv:1502.00627v1)

- Added PlummerPotential, a standard Plummer potential.

- Add support for converting potential parameters to NEMO format and
units: nemo_accname and nemo_accpars (both instance and general
Potential method).

- Added nemo/ directory for C++ implementations of additional NEMO
potentials (not included in the NEMO release); add PowSphwCut.cc for
PowerSphericalPotential2Cutoff and Makefile to compile and install
it. This allows gyrfalcON simulations with MWPotential2014.

- Allow user to directly specify the integration step size to use in
orbit integration.

- Better implementations of vcirc, eipfreq, and verticalfreq for lists
of potentials that allows for negative amplitude components.

- Improvements to streamdf: add progIsTrack keyword to specify that
the progenitor= keyword actually specifies the desired starting
phase-space point of the track; the phase-space point of the
progenitor is calculated. Refactored streamdf setup to make this
easy to implement.

- Orbit fitting can now be performed in custom sky coordinates
(requires one to specify customsky=True and to implement and pass
the functions (a) lb_to_customsky= and (b) pmllpmbb_to_customsky=,
similar to lb_to_radec and pmllpmbb_to_pmradec). For example, this
allows one to do an orbit fit in the GD-1 frame of Koposov et
al. (2010).

- Orbit.time now returns the times at which an Orbit is integrated if
called without arguments.

- Slightly improved implementation of actionAngleStaeckel.py (more
robust umin/umax finding).

==================

- Added MWPotential2014: a Milky-Way-like potential fit to a bunch of
relevant data on the Milky Way; supersedes MWPotential, which is
still included; changed many examples to use this new potential;

- Changed default integrator to symplec4_c;

- Changed default vo and ro to 220 km/s and 8 kpc, respectively;

- Allow Orbit initialization to specify a distance and velocity scale
that is then used to output distances, velocities, energies,
actions, etc. in physical coordinates;

- Added an orbit-fitting routine (Orbit.fit).

- Added virial radius of NFW potential, allow initialization of NFW
potential with concentration and mass;

- Added potential.mass to return the mass enclosed for individual
potential instances; both spherical and axisymmetric potentials are
covered.

- Sped up many of the functions in galpy.util.bovy_coords by removing
scipy.frompyfunc dependency;

- Added galpy.util.bovy_conversion.dens_in_gevcc,
galpy.util.bovy_conversion.force_in_10m13kms2,
galpy.util.bovy_conversion.dens_in_criticaldens,
galpy.util.bovy_conversion.dens_in_meanmatterdens.

- Much improved test coverage.

- Added planarPotential.LinShuReductionFactor to calculate the
reduction factor for the response of a kinematically warm population
to a spiral perturbation.

- Added non-axisymmetric DFs to the top-level and the documentation.

- New streamdf track calculation (see arXiv_v2/published version of
Bovy 2014); better handdling of coordinate-transformation
parameters in streamdf.

- Installation now prints informative message about whether or not the
C extensions were installed.

- More informative warning messages when C functions are not used.

- Fix issues with non-square grids in the C implementation of
interpRZPotential.

- Added Orbit.flip to generate new Orbit instances with flipped
velocities.

- Improved actionAngle frequencies for circular orbits.

- Removed actionAngleFlat and actionAnglePower, because they are
superseded.

- Added hasC_dxdv member to Potential instances to indicate whether or
not they can be used with integrate_dxdv

- Add C implementation of PowerSphericalPotentialwCutoff;

- Moved MovingObjectPotential, BurkertPotential, and interpRZPotential
to top level; better implementation of interpRZPotential;

- Better handling of vo,ro, and solarmotion in Orbit instances (Orbit
initialization value is now used to generate RA, Dec, etc. outputs);

- Added --no-openmp installation option to allow installation without
OpenMP support (workaround for clang not supporting OpenMP; not
necessary anymore);