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). These routines should be used at your own risk! Most should give reasonable accurate results, but spot checks against your favorite program are recommenced. The B1950/J2000/Galactic coordinate routines are based on SLALIB routines and agree very closely. Please let me know of any bugs you find or if you have other routines you would like to contribute. Requirements: ------------- Only perl. Developed using version 5.6 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.jive.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.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) 1999-2001 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. The J2000/B1950 routines are based on the FORTRAN version of SLALIB. As such they are subject to a restrictive usage. In particular *THEY CANNOT BE USED IN A COMMERCIAL GAIN*. I hope to eventually replace them with similar accuracy routines with a GPL type license. The SLALIB license is included.