Release of healpy 1.19.0

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I am pleased to announce the release of healpy 1.19.0.

This release includes a large number of fixes and improvements, many of which were made possible by adopting an “agentic” workflow. As detailed in my recent blog post, I have been using AI coding agents to help triage and fix issues, allowing us to close old bugs and improve the codebase significantly.

You can install the new version from PyPI:

pip install healpy==1.19.0

Or from conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge healpy

Breaking Change in blm_gauss

This release includes one breaking change that users should be aware of.

The blm_gauss() function has been updated to use the l(l+1) formula, making it consistent with gauss_beam() and the standard definition from Challinor et al. 2000 (astro-ph/0008228). Previously, it used the l^2 formula from the LevelS Beam package.

Impact: This change affects the computed spherical harmonic coefficients for Gaussian beams. If you rely on the exact values produced by blm_gauss() for precise beam modeling, you should check if this change affects your results. The new implementation is more accurate and consistent with other tools in the ecosystem.

Summary of Changes

Here is a summary of the key changes in this release:

• Projections and Plotting:
  • Fixed projscatter, projplot, and projtext to only draw on the current axes instead of all subplots.
  • Fixed the Lambert projection in projview which was displaying the lower half of the sky incorrectly.
  • Added half-sky plotting support for the Lambert projection via the latra parameter in projview.
  • Fixed DPI and font size issues in visufunc and newvisufunc. Hard-coded font sizes were replaced with relative values (‘large’, ‘medium’) that scale with DPI, and projview now supports a dpi parameter.
• Pixel and Harmonic Operations:
  • Added support for automatically adjusting latitudes within the [-90, 90] range in ang2pix.
  • Implemented NESTED ordering support in query_strip.
  • pixwin now loads pixel window functions from a local datapath or downloads and caches them using astropy, similar to how pixel weights are handled.
  • Fixed a TypeError in alm2map and alm2map_der1 when using complex64 input arrays.
• I/O and Dependencies:
  • write_cl now supports arbitrary columns and an extra_header argument.
  • Updated the bundled CFITSIO to version 4.6.3.
  • Pinned Sphinx < 9 for documentation builds to avoid crashes on Read the Docs.
• Other Improvements:
  • dist2holes now allows ignoring small mask holes via pixel- and area-based thresholds.
  • Declared support for Python 3.14 in packaging and wheels.
  • CI improvements: utilizing Matplotlib’s bundled freetype for Linux wheels, simplifying testing on musllinux.

For a full list of changes, please refer to the CHANGELOG.