Astro::Telescope
================

This class can be used to retrieve and process details of particular
telescopes. It can be used to determine the location and altitude
of a telescope as well as the observational limits.

The list of supported telescopes can be obtained from the SLALIB
documentation: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/star/docs/sun67.htx/sun67.html
(in particular the slaObs routine).

Requirements
------------

This class uses Astro::SLA. In the future this dependency will
be removed and the telescope tables will be kept internally.

Modifying the MPC observatory code list
---------------------------------------

To allow for Minor Planet Center observatory code use, this module
uses a data file containing the MPC observatory code, longitude, and
parallax coefficients for a large number of observatories. This data
file resides in tmpl/MPC.dat and a new version can be
obtained from http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/lists/ObsCodes.html. To use
an updated version, copy the information from that page (only the data,
not any of the headers) into tmpl/MPC.dat, then build
this module again. This will automatically create Telescope/MPC.pm,
which can then be installed as part of this module.

Building
--------

  perl Makefile.PL
  make
  make test
  make install

The test make sure some simple parameters can be obtained and
that limits work as expected.


Authors
-------

This module was written by Tim Jenness  <t.jenness@jach.hawaii.edu>
of the Joint Astronomy Centre. Updates have been supplied by Brad
Cavanagh <b.cavanagh@jach.hawaii.edu> of the Joint Astronomy Centre.

Copyright (C) 2007, 2008, 2010 Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Copyright (C) 1998-2005 Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Changes
-------

  v0.70 - Now uses Module::Build
        - MPC functionality available without requiring Astro::SLA
        - Default limits of the horizon for observability
        - setlimits() method can now be used to set observability limits.

  v0.60 - Updates for MPC observatory codes and related information.
          Can now instantiate an object with specified coordinates.

  v0.50 - First release to CPAN