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healpy 1.20.1: last release with macOS 14 wheels

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The healpy 1.20.1 release is now available on PyPI. This release introduces several important bug fixes and new features, but it is primarily notable because it marks the final release that will ship macOS 14 arm64 wheels.

macOS 14 runner retirement context

GitHub is retiring its macOS 14 hosted runner image on November 2, 2026, with brownout windows causing temporary job failures starting on October 5, 2026. Because healpy built its macOS 14 arm64 wheels (macosx_14_0_arm64) using this runner, version 1.20.1 will be the last release to support it.

Moving forward, future releases will target macOS 15. The underlying issue is that the Homebrew OpenMP runtime (libomp) used to build the wheels now requires macOS 15 or newer. Consequently, a wheel tagged for macOS 14 would fail to load, as cibuildwheel’s delocate step rejects it. Upgrading to the newest GitHub runner (macOS 26) was not yet possible since the pinned Homebrew llvm@15 compiler cannot build against the macOS 26 SDK.

Users on macOS 14 Apple Silicon can remain on version 1.20.1, and pip will automatically resolve to this newest compatible wheel. The CI migration details can be found in pull request #1129, where wheel builds were moved to macOS 15, and the release checklist is tracked in issue #1130.

What’s new in 1.20.1

This release brings a few key improvements and fixes to the library:

  • Fix: rotate_alm in-place updates now correctly copy rotated coefficients back for non-C-contiguous complex128 inputs (issue #702).
  • Fix: lonlat2thetaphi with latauto=True no longer modifies caller-owned arrays and now correctly accepts read-only arrays (pull request #1123).
  • Feature: write_cl gained a column_units argument to store units in the FITS TUNITn keywords, and it now raises a ValueError when the length of column_names mismatches the cl arrays (pull request #828).
  • Dev: The test data path has been centralized in a DATAPATH constant.

Release stats

The release consists of 36 files uploaded to PyPI. These include the source distribution (sdist) and wheels for cp310 through cp314, covering Linux manylinux 2.28, macOS arm64, and macOS x86_64 architectures.