[AstroPy] API question: Instantiating of time/coord and similar

[David Berry]

Hi Wolfgang

If you are writing an object-oriented coordinate handling system,
PyAST may give you some ideas (see
http://dsberry.github.com/starlink/pyast.html). It's a python
interface  to the WCS coordinate handling system used by the DS9 and
GAIA image browsers amongst other things.

On your specific question, fifteen years of using AST has convinced me
that separating the definition of the coordinate system from the
coordinate values themselves leads to greater flexibility. So AST has
a "Frame" class that defines the properties of a coordinate system,
and then it has a PointList class which encapsulates a Frame  and
numerical axis values for a set of points. So using pyast, an
instantiation of a PointSet to describe a set of points on the sky in
galactic coords would look like this:

import starlink.Ast as Ast
frame = Ast.SkyFrame( "System=Galactic" )
points = Ast.PointList( frame, [[ 120.2,78.0], [118.3,77.0], [115.6,72.3] ] )

So for instance with a separate Frame class, it is natural to have a
Frame method that automatically generates a transformation between two
Frames:

frame2 = Ast.SkyFrame( "System=ICRS" )
ICRS_to_galactic =  Ast.Convert( frame, frame2 )

("ICRS_to_galactic" is a "Mapping" that allows numerical axis values
to be transformed from "frame" to "frame2").

or to create compound Frames by combining two or more Frames into a
more complex coordinate system. For instance, a Frame to  describe a
3D spectral cube:

frame3 = Ast.SpecFrame( "System=VELO, RestFreq=1.0E15, StdOfRest=LSRK" )
cubeframe = Ast.CmpFrame( frame, frame3 )

and you can use Frames for lots of other purposes (e.g. creating trees
of Frames connected by Mappings to describe a library of coordinate
systems, etc).

David


On 2 May 2012 01:05, Wolfgang Kerzendorf <wkerzendorf at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> I've just worked on the time package in astropy
> (PR https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/212) which generated some
> discussion about the general API for instantiating time/coord (and similar).
>
> There are multiple ideas and issues. I'll use the coordinates as an example
> as it demonstrates the problems rather well:
>
> Imagine a class coord that somehow takes a coordinate stores it in an
> internal format (let's say x, y, z for coords) and then can convert it into
> any other format (galactic, equatorial, my fancy system).
>
>
>
> Instantiation:
>
> (1) The instantiation can happen through different keywords: mycoord =
> coord(equatorial=(200, 20)); mycoord = coord(galactic=(200,20)).
>
> (2) The instantiation can happen through classmethods: mycoord =
> coord.from_equatorial(200,20); mycoord = coord.from_galactic(200,20)
>
> the next question is how flexible should this be (using notation (1)):
>
> mycoord = coord(equatorial=(200, 20)) and mycoord =
> coord(equatorial=('15:20:44.5', '3d5m7s')).
>
> or should we require that it is spelt out what is read (format and units
> would have defaults):
>
> mycoord = coord(equatorial=(200, 20), format='num', units='degree') and
> mycoord = coord(equatorial=('15:20:44.5', '3d5m7s'), format='sex',
> units='hour')
>
> There are many other implementation possibilities. Brainstorm! ;-)
>
> But please stay on topic, we are only talking about the API exposed to the
> user here.
>
> Cheers
>     Wolfgang
>
>
>
>
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