TOPCAT bugfix release

[Mark Taylor]

Hi all,

this is to announce a minor (bugfix) release of TOPCAT, v4.5-1.
TL;DR: if you are currently running v4.5, I suggest you upgrade.

This release is mainly to address a BUG I carelessly introduced
in v4.5, in connection with the new STILTS command export
functionality in the TOPCAT plot windows.
In v4.5 if you do some plotting on a table and then
save it to VOTable or FITS-plus format
(FITS-plus is generally what you get if you ask for FITS),
it includes a potentially large amount of useless metadata
in the file (around 0.5k for each plotted frame, so if you
do lots of panning and zooming it can add up).
This doesn't actually break anything but it's annoying and means
your saved files may be much bigger than they ought to be.

This release, v4.5-1, fixes that and also deletes any of this
useless metadata it finds in files that it loads, so if you have one
of these bloated files a TOPCAT (v4.5-1) load/save cycle will
clean it up.  Similarly STILTS (v3.1-2) processing. 

So, if you have TOPCAT v4.5, I suggest you upgrade to v4.5-1.
There is a matching STILTS v3.1-2 and STIL v3.2-2 as well,
but those upgrades don't matter so much.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

There are a few new functions in the expression language too
(modulus, phase folding, IAU designation decoding,
distance between points with spherical polar coords)
if you like that sort of thing.

Downloads etc from the usual place:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/