[AstroPy] Python Functions for Horizontal to Equatorial and vice versa?

[Johann Cohen-Tanugi]

thanks Vicki. What is the status of astrolib? It does not seem to make 
it to the front page of the stsci web site....
best,
Johann

On 04/22/2010 04:32 PM, Victoria G. Laidler wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Johann Cohen-Tanugi wrote:
>> hi Wayne,
>>
>> I am getting a bit lost in the reorganization of the sts software, 
>> and several cross-references from sts to scipy seem broken.
>> Anyway, there is https://www.stsci.edu/trac/ssb/astrolib
>> and inside you have the package coords, which was claimed to be a 
>> large port of the IDM astron library parts that deal with 
>> astronomical coordinates. I am not sure what the status of this is. 
>> Anyone on this list?
> I'm the primary developer of the Coords package. It's not in active 
> development right now but what's there is stable. It doesn't presently 
> provide transformation methods to and from altazimuth coordinates, but 
> the Position.tpmstate() method does provide an "expert user" interface 
> for the underlying TPM package, which does. You can see the API docs 
> here:
> http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/coords_api/index.html
>
> I don't have the time right now to implement support for altaz 
> coordinates, but if anyone else wants to do so we'll happily take a 
> patch if it comes with tests.
>
> cheers,
> Vicki Laidler
>
>> On 04/21/2010 05:46 AM, Anne Archibald wrote:
>>> On 19 April 2010 15:15, Wayne Watson<sierra_mtnview@sbcglobal.net>  
>>> wrote:
>>>> I'm looking for two functions to do the coordinate transformations in
>>>> the Subject.  Just those two. I don't need any others.
>>> I think you will find that you need many other functions than just
>>> horizontal to equatorial: the transformation depends on LST, for
>>> example, which you will need to convert to or from GMT, and on
>>> latitude/longitude; you'll probably want to convert various
>>> coordinates between sexagesimal and radians or degrees; you may even
>>> find galactic coordinates useful. Just go with something like a python
>>> wrapper for SLALIB.
>>>
>>> If you really want just those two functions, if it's really essential
>>> to keep dependencies down at the cost of debugging pain, you can write
>>> such a function fairly easily by converting to a 3D vector
>>> representation and back.
>>>
>>> Good luck,
>>> Anne
>>>
>