TOPCAT/STILTS release

[Mark Taylor]

Hi all,

this is to announce the following releases:

   TOPCAT v3.9     http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   STILTS v2.4     http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
   STIL   v3.0-3   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/

These releases feature significant improvements to crossmatching:
asymmetric match options (often better for crowded fields than the
existing Best Match Only option) and capabilities for matching
general elliptical shapes on a plane or the sky.

Some notable usability improvements include degree-based angular
calculation functions (alongside the existing radian-based ones),
ability to reorder columns by dragging them in the columns window,
ability to discard multiple tables at once, ADQL syntax checking
(thanks to Gregory Mantelet's ADQL library from CDS) ... and more!

Finally, the SAMP hub launched by this version of TOPCAT has the
new Web Profile turned on by default, allowing SAMP-enabled web
pages to communicate with TOPCAT and other desktop tools.

Full details of the changes, which include the usual crop of
bug fixes and minor enhancements, can be found here:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html

Thanks as ever to all the user feedback which has contributed to
these updates.  Please send any comments, bug reports, questions
etc to the topcat-user list or to me.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/