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Re: Interstellar distance
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2005 Sep 11, 10:32 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2005 Sep 11, 10:32 -0700
Mike Hannibal wrote: > I have looked through the archives but have been > unable to find the way to calculate predicted > inter-stellar, interplanetary, > stellar/planetary/lunar/solar etc distances. The IAU (International Astronomical Union) has an approved collection of positional astronomy algorithms online as the SOFA library. It is written in Fortran 77. On my system the full SOFA package compiled without a hitch using MinGW, a Windows port of the GNU multi-langauge compiler. http://www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk/ I'm glad you asked the question. When I checked the SOFA page, I noticed that they posted a new package a few days ago. Among other things, it fixes a tiny bug in the separation angle routine. The former version returned an incorrect result if the two points were in exactly opposite directions.