Astro::	- Assorted astronomical routines

Astro::Time, Astro::Coord and Astro::Misc provide a collection of useful
astronomical routines written entirely in Perl (so no hassling about
installing external libraries is required).

The routines provided include various time conversions (dayno to day/month,
local sidereal time, calendar to Modified Julian day) and coordinate
transformations (J2000 to B1950, B1950 to Galactic, Az,El to Ha,Dec),
string parsing (12:00:00 -> 0.5) as well as a number of astronomical tools
(eg observed Galactic velocity to kinematic distance).

*NOTE* These routines should probably NOT be considered high
precision. I have tried as far as possible to compare the results with
other libraries (mainly SLALIB), but I guarantee nothing. The results
should probably be to better than an arcsec or so, and provide a great
mechanism for planning observations and searching through catalogs
but be wary. In particular the J2000 <-> B1950 conversion is different
to the SLALIB conversion of around 0.2 arcsec.

Please let me know of any bugs you find of if you have other routines you
would like to contribute.

Requirements:
-------------

Only perl. Developed using version 5.005_03 on Solaris and Linux.


Where can I get it from?
------------------------
  http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Astro/Astro-?.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.nfra.nl/pub/phillips/Astro-?.tar.gz

Installation:
------------

 % perl Makefile.PL
 % make
 % make test
 % make install

Documentation:
--------------

Documentation is included in the three modules as POD. Man files should be
created in the installation process.

Changes:
--------

See the Changes file

Author:
-------

Chris Phillips, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe

 phillips@jive.nfra.nl

Acknowledgment:
---------------

 Simon Ellingsen wrote most of the routines in Coord.pm
 A few of the routines are based in code from Edward King

Copyright
---------

This module is copyright (C) 1999 Chris Phillips.  All rights
reserved.  This program is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.