New Celestial Coordinates Task - IMCTRAN

A new task for transforming image celestial coordinate systems from one coordinate system to another, imctran, has been added to the image matching package IMMATCH. Imctran currently supports the equatorial (fk4, fk4 [no e terms], fk5, geocentric apparent) coordinate systems on input and output, and the ecliptic, galactic, and supergalactic celestial coordinate systems on output. Full support for the non-equatorial coordinate systems will become available with the next major release of iraf. Imctran handles the tan, sin, and arc sky projections correctly, but should not be used with the gls projection in its current form. A typical application of imctran is to precess the coordinate systems of a set of images to a common epoch.

Imctran uses the iraf imio and mwcs libraries to attach celestial coordinate values to the input image pixels and the Starlink positional astronomy library slalib to perform any required celestial coordinate transformations. Slalib has been made available to the iraf project courtesy of Patrick Wallace of Starlink, and will be distributed as part of the iraf core system math package in future releases of iraf.

Imctran is available as part of the external add-on package IMMATCH. To retrieve and install immatch, follow the installation instructions found in the readme file.

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Last updated: 24April1996