For many purposes, the ICRS coordinate system is perfectly adequate. In order to support conversion between a variety of celestial coordinate systems, however, you can create SkyFrames that represent any of these.
Selection of a particular coordinate system is performed simply by setting a value for the SkyFrame's (character string) System attribute. This setting is most conveniently done when the SkyFrame is created. For example, a SkyFrame representing the old FK4 (B1950.0) coordinate system would be created by:
skyframe = astSkyFrame( "System=FK4" );
Note that specifying ``SystemFK4'' also changes the associated
equinox (from J2000.0 to B1950.0). This is because the default value
of the SkyFrame's Equinox attribute (
) depends
on the System attribute setting.
You may change the System value at any time, although this is not
usually needed. The values supported are set out in the attribute's
description in and include a variety
of equatorial coordinate systems, together with ecliptic and galactic
coordinates.
General spherical coordinates are supported by specifying
``Systemunknown''. You should note, though, that no Mapping can be
created to convert between ``unknown'' coordinates and any of the other
celestial coordinate systems (see
).
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy