Any astronomers out there? I'm wondering if anyone has produced or stumbled upon a .NET (preferably C#) implementation of the US Naval Observatoru Vector Astrometry Subroutines (NOVAS).
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A:
I know nothing (of consequence) about astronomy, and absolutely nothing about NOVAS, so please take this with a grain of salt.
But, I did look at the website, and it looks like they have a C implementation. You could always take the C implementation, access it via pinvoke, and write a C# wrapper around it.
Scott Wisniewski
2009-05-08 01:30:15
In fact, I am aware of something called NOVAS-COM, which is the NOVAS library with a COM wrapper around it, which is usable from .NET. What I was really interested in, though, was to see if someone had rearchitected it to be more OO.
Tim Long
2009-05-08 01:35:25
For that kind of thing (lots of vector math and matrix multiplications involving astronomical objects) I wouldn't think being "OO" would really help much.
Scott Wisniewski
2009-05-08 02:00:01
@Scott: There are large OO scientific packages...ROOT for one. But the OO part involves the open files, read in this, organize that, and write results parts of the work. The raw crunching still looks like plain, procedural, imperative programming.
dmckee
2009-05-08 02:29:08
+1
A:
Are you only interested in a port of that library or anything usable from C# for astronomy?
I don't have anything for the first part, but for the second I would take a look at AGI's Components. Their libraries provide ways to compute all kind of astronomical data. The Dynamic Geometry Library lets you model everything including planets and such rather easily.
Erich Mirabal
2009-05-08 18:55:21