Argh. Lang came into town and we added another JPL-ephemeris-based unit test to our code and it failed. It is a coordinate system problem we weren't able to diagnose before we ran out of day. But we started playing with the Canon Digital Rebels that Sam bought to put on the telescopes we have on the roof of 715 Broadway.
The bug turned out to be both obvious and cool: JPL includes light travel time. 8 minutes per AU matters when you're working at machine precision!
ReplyDelete