[AstroPy] Calculating alt/az or zenith angle/parallactic angle

[Tim Cornwell]

Hi Erik,

Thanks for the reply. I’m writing a reference library for SKA (part of the Science Data Processor consortium work), and as part of that I need to do simulations of observations with SKA. The configuration of an interferometric array is a function of hour angle and the absolute time is not relevant for most observations. So most of the simulations can be done in hour angle without having a choose a notional time. The reasons for this are that we can observe day or night. This isn’t always true but it mostly is. Some effects are purely dependent on Az, El (e.g. power patten of an array fixed to the ground or an alt-az antenna).

I can do this in other packages (such as casa) but astropy is lightweight but capable so I’d rather use it if at all possible.

Regards,

Tim

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Tim Cornwell
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On 30 January 2017 at 4:08:31 am, Erik Tollerud (erik.tollerud at gmail.com) wrote:

Hi Francisco,


> I think we discarded Skycoord due to the speed so we used PyEphem.

Can you give a bit more on the specific use case that led you to this decision?  SkyCoord has a fair amount of space for optimization, so it would be useful to know what kinds of use cases are coming out as "slow" so we can try to make them better.


---
Erik T

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