[AstroPy] Inverting SkyCoord spherical offset transformations
Warren Hack
hack at stsci.edu
Thu Jul 5 13:49:40 EDT 2018
Hello,
The astropy documentation provides a very useful example of how to
compute the offset between 2 SkyCoord positions at
http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/coordinates/matchsep.html?highlight=spherical_offsets#separations.
Specifically, the example for "spherical_offsets_to" in that section of
documentation shows how to derive a delta RA and delta Dec for those
source positions. In my case, though, I already have the delta RA and
delta Dec from an astrometric solution for that observation and want to
apply those deltas to the source positions to reproduce the astrometric
catalog positions. So, the operation I am really interested in would be
the inverse of this example where those deltas would be applied to the
"bright_star" SkyCoord position to reproduce (within machine precision)
the "faint_galaxy" position in RA and Dec.
It could be that some other functionality in Astropy would be more
suited to providing the right answer to this problem, but the
documentation does not provide any indication of how to do this (at
least not where I could find it). Any pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Warren Hack
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