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SkyCoords.jl

Astronomical coordinate systems in Julia

Install

julia> Pkg.add("git://github.com/kbarbary/SkyCoords.jl.git")

Usage

There are three supported coordinate systems:

  • ICRSCoords
  • GalCoords
  • FK5Coords
julia> using SkyCoords

# create a coordinates object
julia> c1 = ICRSCoords(0., 0.)  # inputs are ra, dec in radians
ICRSCoords(0.0,0.0)

# access ra, dec individually
julia> c1.ra
0.0

# convert to a different system
julia> c2 = convert(GalCoords, c1)
GalCoords(1.681404315278054,-1.0504869904089078)

# Note that galactic coordinate fields are l, b
julia> c2.l
1.681404315278054

# Note that FK5Coords is parameterized on equinox
julia> convert(FK5Coords{2000}, c1)
FK5Coords{2000}(1.1102233710147402e-7,4.411803426976326e-8)

# Arrays of coordinates

# create an array of coordinates 
julia> c1 = [ICRSCoords(0., 0.) for i=1:3]
3-element Array{ICRSCoords,1}:
 ICRSCoords(0.0,0.0)
 ICRSCoords(0.0,0.0)
 ICRSCoords(0.0,0.0)

# convert entire array to a different system
julia> convert(Vector{GalCoords}, c1)
3-element Array{GalCoords,1}:
 GalCoords(1.681404315278054,-1.0504869904089078)
 GalCoords(1.681404315278054,-1.0504869904089078)
 GalCoords(1.681404315278054,-1.0504869904089078)

# There's no performance gain from using this "vectorized" convert,
# except conversions to/from FK5Coords, where the equinox precession
# can be done just once for the entire vector, leading to a modest ~2x
# speed up.
julia> convert(Vector{FK5Coords{1975}}, c1)
3-element Array{FK5Coords{1975},1}:
 FK5Coords{1975}(6.277595732508468,-0.0024292220493946897)
 FK5Coords{1975}(6.277595732508468,-0.0024292220493946897)
 FK5Coords{1975}(6.277595732508468,-0.0024292220493946897)

Performance

For small numbers of coordinates, conversions are much faster than astropy.coordinates in Python. The follow plot shows the performance for converting ICRS coordinates to various other systems (Galactic, FK5J2000 and FK5J1975), using astropy.coordinates (py_*) and SkyCoords.jl (jl_*). The x axis denotes the number of coordinates being simultaneously converted, with 1 cooresponding to scalar coordinates.

times

For scalar coordinates, SkyCoords.jl is up to 100,000 times faster. Even for a vector of one million coordinates, SkyCoords.jl is still 2-4 times faster. The source code for these benchmarks can be found in bench/.