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.