Classes for manipulating N-dimensional astronomical data objects.
World coordinate systems
The JNIAST package, i.e. classes in uk.ac.starlink.ast
is currently used for treatment of world coordianate systems (WCS)
within this package.
JNIAST is based on native compiled code, which may not be available
on all platforms/installations. In the absence of the JNIAST
package shared libraries (on unix, this typically means that
libjniast.so is not on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH), the NDX
classes will still function without crashing, but will in general
ignore WCS information where it exists. Cases which explicitly require
WCS information however will generally cause a fatal error
(some sort of {@link java.lang.LinkageError}).
For example, if JNIAST is not installed the
{@link uk.ac.starlink.ndx.Ndx#hasWCS} method
will always return false, but the
{@link uk.ac.starlink.ndx.Ndxs#getAst} method
will throw an error.