Contains classes for
World Coordinate System transformations.
Currently this package consists of ports of pieces of the
WCSTOOLS
library originally written in C. The main purpose
of these classes is to do WCS to/from image pixel conversions,
and so only those WCSTOOLS files necessary to achieve this
were ported. In addition to porting files from WCSTOOLS,
enhancements were made to hook the code to Tom McGlynn's FITS I/O classes
(via the nom.tam.fits.Header class) so that the required FITS header
information is automatically extracted from the FITS file.
Future Work
Note that since this package was written, other potentially better solutions
have been created by other people. Mark Calabretta's
WCSLIB library (used by WCSTOOLS),
for example, has been ported to Java. The NCSA
Horizon project has also done some
interesting work in coordinate system conversions. Possibly in the future
we might reevaluate this package and choose to use one of the other libraries instead.