On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:12:33 GMT, "Mark Lepkowski" wrote:

To
accurately determine which constellation an object is located in today one
must translate back to the 1875 frame. How about some new formal boundaries
along the meridians of right ascension and parallels of declination for the
mean equator and equinox of 2000.0?

How about not!

Precessing the constellation boundaries is trivial (literally, three lines of
code in C, including a function call to a general precession function). But if
you change their locations, you break every piece of astronomical software out
there. You also move stars into new constellations, which means some of them now
have to be renamed. Every scientific paper that references an object will have
to be evaluated for whether that object even exists (with that name) anymore!
The existing boundaries are just fine! Who cares if they don't happen to line up
with another set of arbitrary coordinates? And even if you change the boundaries
to line up with 2000.0 coordinates, it isn't 2000 anymore, so they will still
have to be precessed in order to be used. And of course, if we keep moving the
boundaries every century or so (to be pretty), after a while the boundaries
aren't even going to line up with the classical constellations. We're going to
feel pretty silly talking about Scorpius when it is in Sagittarius!

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com