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v12.9.0 Jul 2015
New features
- Mix model components are no longer heavily restricted in their usage. Previously mix components could only be placed at the start of a model expression, to operate on the results of the rest of the expression. Now they can be inserted throughout the expression in the same manner as convolution components.
- Models with mix components can also be assigned to source numbers other than 1. A corollary of this is that a mix model is no longer required to operate on all currently loaded spectra.
- To allow more than one mix model at a time the syntax for XFLT#### keywords has been generalized. These keywords are now strings of form "key: value" with xspec maintaining an internal database of key, value pairs which mixing model code can access. Backward compatibility with the old version of XFLT#### containing only a value is maintained.
- Expanded the types of expressions allowed in parameter linking. It can now handle the same mathematical functionality supported in mdefine equations. Related to this, parameters can also be specified as p# and modelName:p# in link expressions, as well as the old # and modelName:#. The link expressions are now displayed using the p# format.
- The output of the plot margin command is now independent of the grid size. There is a new plot integprob command which also must be run after the margin command and which plots the integrated probability within the contours shown.
- The data and back commands now handle files with multiple SPECTRUM extensions. There are a number of ways of specifying a particular extension: filename{N} will use the Nth SPECTRUM extension; filename{SPECTRUM2} will look for an extension called SPECTRUM2; filename{back} will use the first SPECTRUM extension with the HDUCLAS2 keyword set to “BKG”; filename{name=value} will look for a SPECTRUM extension with keyword name set to value (in this case there must be no spaces within the {}). If the BACKFILE keyword in a source filename is set to the filename itself then XSPEC will get the background from the extension with HDUCLAS2 set to “BKG” (this, finally, makes Chandra level 3 files work seemlessly in XSPEC).
- The error command now has a nonew option. This determines whether to repeat the calculation when a new minimum is found. Previously it was relying on the query setting to make this decision.
- Added grey-scale image as background to to contour plots (to remove them use the image off command in PLT. plot dem now displays a histogram. The new plot eqw option shows the distribution of equivalent width values after running the eqwidth command with the err option.
- New model nlapec. There is also an APECNOLINES xset option which will turn off lines for all apec models.
- The models using AtomDB files now require the line files to be sorted in increasing order of energy within each element and ion. This allows a speed-up in the model calculation.
- Replaced the rescalecov script with the chain rescale command.
- The plot delc command now works for cstat, plotting (obs-mod)/error, however it is important to remember that this is not plotting contributions to the statistic.
Enhancements previously released as patches to 12.8.2
- A new -udmget64 option has been added to initpackage. This is intended for Mac platform users with local Fortran models which still make use of the udmget memory allocation function.
- tclout steppar can now retrieve values of the variable parameters as well has the fixed parameters which are being stepped through.
Bug fixes
All bug fixes to v12.8.2 released as patches are included in v12.9.0. In addition the following problems have been corrected:
- For the case where counting statistics are not applied, fakeit now outputs the spectrum in a RATE column rather than COUNTS. This is to remove bias caused by truncation errors. It also now outputs a STAT_ERR column and sets the POISSERR flag to false.
- Special characters have been removed from all model parameter names and (generally) replaced with underscores. This is to make their name strings more easily accessible in PyXspec.
- When calculating tclout peakrsid with Cstat, it should not make use of correction files.
- Redundant model fold calculations have been removed during certain update contexts.
- Fix to vequil model array assignment error.
- The default filenames for fakeit output should always be in the current run directory, even when the response file is in a different directory.
- A file-write race condition has been eliminated for the case of running lmod in parallel XSPEC sessions.
- the vvnei model had the tau and meankT parameters flipped.
- the AtomDB input files were being reopened unnecessarily often.
Changes to PyXSpec
New Features:
- Local models may now be written in Python and inserted into XSPEC's models library with new AllModels.addPyMod() function.
- The plot array retrieval interface (ie. Plot.x(), Plot.y()) has been expanded to allow retrieval from secondary plot panels in a mulit-panel plot.
- New Parameter.index attribute.
- New backscale attribute for Spectrum and Background classes.
- Added new function Fit.stepparResults() for retrieving results of most recent steppar run. (Previously available as a patch)
- New noWrite option added to AllData.fakeit (Previously available as patch)
- The Model.__call__ function now returns Parameter objects by reference rather than by value. This is to allow the returned object to retain any custom attributes the user may have added.
- Improved handling of Ctrl-c breaking in several prompting contexts.