Details
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Type:
RFC
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Status: Implemented
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Resolution: Done
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Component/s: DM
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Labels:None
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Location:This RFC
Description
We will need to apply proper motion corrections (when available) to our reference catalogs when generating astrometric solutions. We have no current standardized schema for these columns. Following suggestions from Paul Price following the lead of Pan-STARRS, I propose the following column names and units.
pmRa -- Proper motion in the RA coordinate (mas/yr; float32)
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pmRaErr -- Error in proper motion in the RA coordinate (mas/yr; float32)
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pmDec -- Proper motion in the Declination coordinate (mas/yr; float32)
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pmDecErr -- Error in proper motion in the Declination coordinate (mas/yr; float32)
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epoch -- Mean epoch (TAI MJD for which the position needs no proper motion correction; float64)
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Note that the definitions above allow direct application of the proper motion correction by multiplying pmRa and pmDec by the difference in epoch in units of years. If the angular distance travelled is to be calculated a correction term to pmRa of cos(Dec) is required (or one could do the dot product in Cartesian 3-space).
If pmRaErr or pmDecErr are missing, zero error will be assumed. If any of pmRa, pmDec, or epoch are missing, no proper motion correction will be applied.
Attachments
Issue Links
- is triggering
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DM-8837 Reference catalog proper motions, parallaxes and errors
- Done
It would definitely be nice to have automatic support for reading Angles in different units, but in the absence of such a feature I won't object to storing radians.