NAME

Astro::Hipparcos - Perl extension for reading the Hipparcos star catalog

SYNOPSIS

use Astro::Hipparcos;
my $catalog = Astro::Hipparcos->new("thefile.dat");
while (defined(my $record = $catalog->get_record())) {
  print $record->get_HIP(), "\n"; # print record id
}

# the twelth record (i.e. first is 1, NOT 0)
my $specific_record = $catalog->get_record(12);

DESCRIPTION

This is an extension for reading the Hipparcos star catalog.

METHODS

new

Given a file name, returns a new Astro::Hipparcos catalog object.

get_record

Returns the next record (line) from the catalog as an Astro::Hipparcos::Record object.

append_record

Appends a record to an existing (or new) catalog. Can be used to select subsamples of the full record and write them to new data files. Confer the example in this distribution examples/simple_selection.pl.

SEE ALSO

For an example what you can produce with this little tool, have a look at http://steffen-mueller.net/hipparcos/hipparcos.eps.bz2. This is implemented in the examples/draw_hammer_proj.pl example in this distribution.

Astro::Hipparcos::Record

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparcos_Catalogue

At the time of this writing, you could obtain a copy of the Hipparcos catalogue from ftp://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/adc/archives/catalogs/1/1239/ (hip_main.dat.gz).

AUTHOR

Steffen Mueller, <smueller@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2009-2010 by Steffen Mueller

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.