We are using palpy in some of the LSST simulations code, so we are distributing a version of palpy as well as our own code. Currently we distribute master from 1855e5, but I'd prefer to distribute a release. We need the new vectorized methods, so I was wondering if there is a timeline for having a new release or if we should just continue distributing master from some (relatively arbitrary) commit?

Hi Palpy team! I'm dealing with a couple issues related to Cython that I was hoping someone could help resolve

This is the error I get when I try to pip install palpy with the most recent version of cython

When trying to build cython from source I got a decently longer error message:

I'm running on a Linux backend!

Reading the documentation for mapqk and ampqk, I get the sense that they are supposed to invert each other. Mapqk transforms the mean position of a star into the apparent geocentric position. Ampqk does the opposite. However, Mapqk accepts parallax as one of its arguments. Ampqk does not. Indeed, in using the functions, I have noticed that they do invert each other to sub-milliarcsecond precision when parallax is zero. When parallax is not zero, running the roundtrip through mapqk and ampqk can result in a residual on the order of a few 0.1 arcseconds. Is there some reason these functions are not exact inverses of each other? I understand that subtracting out the effects of proper motion and radial velocity might not make much sense, but I would have assumed that parallax was something that we would want to be able to account for in converting from geocentric apparent to mean position.

Thanks.

I wonder if it would be easy to add useful python help strings so that things like

>>> help(palpy.mapqk)

return useful information. The naive thing to do is to extend the definitions on the python side, but it's a pain to maintain documentation in two places. Maybe it's possible to pass the docstring from c to python via a method in c and then set the func.__doc__. I don't know if that's possible in cython source.

Routine pm doesn't seem to work. No motion is applied.

Example:
import palpy
In [11]: palpy.pm(0., 0., 5., 5., 0., 0., 2000., 2010.)
Out[11]: (0.0, 0.0)

I try to install palpy in Windows for specific application. But I cannot compile it, with VS2015 installed. Does this package support windows or need any change?
Thanks.