Many FlightGear constellations have the wrong shapes; in particular
Orion's belt has the shape of a "V" rather than a straight line! It
seems that whoever built your star database (the data/Astro/stars file
in CVS) made the error of applying a negative sign only to the units,
and not the fractions, of the degrees field. So when trying to turn
the declination of, say, Alnilam - the middle belt star - from degrees
into radians, they read
-1:12:07
as though it meant
"minus one degree, *plus* twelve arcminutes, *plus* seven arcseconds"
rather than reading it properly as either:
"minus one degree, minus twelve arcminutes, minus seven arcseconds"
or
"minus (one degree plus twelve arcminutes plus seven arcseconds)".
I recommend rebuilding the star database from scratch rather than
trying to repair these errors, since the stars file uses very low
precision and trying to correct these positions will compound that
error.
I will be happy to contribute a rebuilt star database (my PyEphem
package can read the xephem star database natively and output the
results in radians); just let me know where to send it. :-)
--
Brandon Craig Rhodes [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rhodesmill.org/brandon
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