SkyCoords.jl

Basic astronomical coordinate systems in Julia

Install

julia> Pkg.add("SkyCoords")

Usage

There are currently three supported coordinate systems. The following immutable types are used to represent coordinates in each system:

• ICRSCoords: ICRS coordinates system
• GalCoords: Galactic coordinates system
• FK5Coords: FK5 coordinates system (with arbitrary equninox)

Each type holds a longitude and latitude, and each is a subtype of AbstractSkyCoords.

julia> using SkyCoords

# create a coordinates object
julia> c1 = ICRSCoords(0., 0.)  # inputs are ra, dec in radians
SkyCoords.ICRSCoords{Float64}(0.0,0.0)

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

# convert to a different system
julia> c2 = convert(GalCoords, c1)
SkyCoords.GalCoords{Float64}(1.6814027872278692,-1.0504884034813007)

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

# FK5Coords is parameterized on equinox.
# Equinox refers to Julian year and can be floating-point or integer
# (though using integers seems to be slightly faster).
julia> convert(FK5Coords{2000}, c1)
SkyCoords.FK5Coords{2000,Float64}(1.1102233723050067e-7,4.411803426976326e-8)


# Arrays of coordinates
# =====================

# create an array of coordinates 
julia> c1 = [ICRSCoords(0., 0.) for i=1:3]
3-element Array{SkyCoords.ICRSCoords{Float64},1}:
 SkyCoords.ICRSCoords{Float64}(0.0,0.0)
 SkyCoords.ICRSCoords{Float64}(0.0,0.0)
 SkyCoords.ICRSCoords{Float64}(0.0,0.0)

# convert entire array to a different system
julia> convert(Vector{GalCoords{Float64}}, c1)
3-element Array{SkyCoords.GalCoords{Float64},1}:
 SkyCoords.GalCoords{Float64}(1.6814,-1.05049)
 SkyCoords.GalCoords{Float64}(1.6814,-1.05049)
 SkyCoords.GalCoords{Float64}(1.6814,-1.05049)

# 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, Float64}}, c1)
3-element Array{SkyCoords.FK5Coords{1975,Float64},1}:
 SkyCoords.FK5Coords{1975,Float64}(6.2776,-0.00242922)
 SkyCoords.FK5Coords{1975,Float64}(6.2776,-0.00242922)
 SkyCoords.FK5Coords{1975,Float64}(6.2776,-0.00242922)

Angular Separation between Coordinates

The separation function allows you to compute the angular (great-circle) distance between two coordinates, in radians, using the Vincenty formula. The coordinates can be also given in different systems. For example, according to SIMBAD the FK5Coords{2000} coordinates of Mizar are

julia> mizar = FK5Coords{2000}(3.507787, 0.958628)

while the GalCoords coordinates of Alcor are

julia> alcor = GalCoords(1.968189, 1.072829)

Their angular separation is given by

julia> separation(mizar, alcor) # Radians
0.003435309169452688

julia> rad2deg(separation(mizar, alcor)) * 60 # Arcminutes
11.809723003933872

Accuracy

All the supported conversions have been compared to the results of astropy.coordinates (to better than 0.0001 arcsec agreement for Float64). In turn, astropy.coordinates has been tested against many other tools.

Performance

For small and moderate 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_* labels) and SkyCoords.jl (jl_* labels). The x axis denotes the number of coordinates being simultaneously converted, with 1 corresponding to scalar coordinates.

For scalar coordinates, SkyCoords.jl is up to 100,000 times faster. For very large vectors of one million coordinates or more, SkyCoords.jl is 2-4 times faster. The source code for these benchmarks can be found in bench/.

License and Credits

License is MIT. This package profits from the hard work that went into astropy.coordinates, especially in terms of testing and coordinate system definitions.