Astro::	- Assorted astronomical routines

Astro::Time, Astro::Coord and Astro::Misc provide a collection of useful
astronomical routines written entirely in Perl (so no hassling about
installing external libraries is required).

The routines provided include various time conversions (dayno to day/month,
local sidereal time, calendar to Modified Julian day) and coordinate
transformations (J2000 to B1950, B1950 to Galactic, Az,El to Ha,Dec),
string parsing (12:00:00 -> 0.5) as well as a number of astronomical tools
(eg observed Galactic velocity to kinematic distance).

These routines should be used at your own risk! Most should give
reasonable accurate results, but spot checks against your favorite
program are recommenced. The B1950/J2000/Galactic coordinate routines
are based on SLALIB routines and agree very closely.

Please let me know of any bugs you find or if you have other routines you
would like to contribute.

Requirements:
-------------

Only perl. Developed using version 5.6 on Solaris and Linux.


Where can I get it from?
------------------------
  http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Astro/Astro-?.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.jive.nl/pub/phillips/Astro-?.tar.gz

Installation:
------------

 % perl Makefile.PL
 % make
 % make test
 % make install

Documentation:
--------------

Documentation is included in the three modules as POD. Man files should be
created in the installation process.

Changes:
--------

See the Changes file

Author:
-------

Chris Phillips, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe

 phillips@jive.nl

Acknowledgment:
---------------

 Simon Ellingsen wrote most of the routines in Coord.pm
 A few of the routines are based in code from Edward King

Copyright
---------

This module is copyright (C) 1999-2001 Chris Phillips.  All rights
reserved.  This program is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The J2000/B1950 routines are based on the FORTRAN version of
SLALIB. As such they are subject to a restrictive usage. In particular
*THEY CANNOT BE USED IN A COMMERCIAL GAIN*. I hope to eventually
replace them with similar accuracy routines with a GPL type
license. The SLALIB license is included.
