Astro::Telescope
================
This class can be used to retrieve and process details of particular
telescopes. It can be used to determine the location and altitude
of a telescope as well as the observational limits.
The list of supported telescopes can be obtained from the SLA or PAL
documentation: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/star/docs/sun67.htx/sun67.html
(in particular the palObs routine).
Requirements
------------
This class uses Astro::PAL which can be installed directly from CPAN.
Modifying the MPC observatory code list
---------------------------------------
To allow for Minor Planet Center observatory code use, this module
uses a data file containing the MPC observatory code, longitude, and
parallax coefficients for a large number of observatories. This data
file resides in tmpl/MPC.dat and a new version can be
obtained from http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/ObsCodes.html.
To use an updated version, copy the information from that page (only the data,
not any of the headers) into tmpl/MPC.dat, then build
this module again. This will automatically create Telescope/MPC.pm,
which can then be installed as part of this module.
Building
--------
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
The test make sure some simple parameters can be obtained and
that limits work as expected.
Authors
-------
This module was written by Tim Jenness <t.jenness@jach.hawaii.edu>
of the Joint Astronomy Centre. Updates have been supplied by Brad
Cavanagh <b.cavanagh@jach.hawaii.edu> of the Joint Astronomy Centre.
Copyright (C) 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Copyright (C) 1998-2005 Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
Changes
-------
v0.71 - Switch to using Astro::PAL
v0.70 - Now uses Module::Build
- MPC functionality available without requiring Astro::SLA
- Default limits of the horizon for observability
- setlimits() method can now be used to set observability limits.
v0.60 - Updates for MPC observatory codes and related information.
Can now instantiate an object with specified coordinates.
v0.50 - First release to CPAN