NAME

Astro::Coord::Constellations - Identify the constellation for position (RA, Dec)

VERSION

Version 0.01

SYNOPSIS

 use Astro::Coord::Constellations qw/constellation_for_eq constellations_table/;

 my $constellation_abbrev = constellation_for_eq($ra, $dec, $epoch);

 my %con      = constellations_table();
 my $name     = $con{'And'}->[0];     # Andromeda
 my $genitive = $con{'And'}->[1]; # Andromedae

DESCRIPTION

Identify the constellation to which a celestial position (as defined by equatorial coordinates for any epoch) belongs to, according to the IAU constellation boundaries.

METHODS

constellation_for_eq

 my $constellation = constellation_for_eq($ra, $dec, $epoch);

Given equatorial coordinates in hours for Right Ascension $ra and degrees for Declination $dec for epoch $epoch in years AD, the constellation (abbreviation) is returned. You can pass the coordinates as the strings you find in human-readable catalogs, see the function read_coordinates of Astro::Coord::Precession for what formats are supported.

UTILITY FUNCTIONS

constellations_table

 my %con = constellations_table();

 $con{UMi}; # ['Ursa Minor', 'Ursa Minoris']

Returns a Perl hash with constellation abbreviations as keys and arrayrefs with the constellation name and genitive.

AUTHOR

Dimitrios Kechagias, <dkechag at cpan.org>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-astro-coord-constellations at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at https://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Astro-Coord-Constellations. You could also raise issues or submit PRs to the github repo below.

GIT

https://github.com/dkechag/Astro-Coord-Constellations

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IAU constellation boundaries from ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/VI/42/data.dat. Based on the Fortran program CONFND by FO @ CDS (francois@simbad.u-strasbg.fr).

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This software is copyright (c) 2021 by Dimitrios Kechagias.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.