PLEASE NOTE: 2010 July 20 / SOFA web sites

The old SOFA web sites http://www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk and http://iau-sofa.hmnao.com are now automatically forwarding requests to our new site http://www.iausofa.org introduced in January 2010. It is our intention to shut down the old sites at the time of the next SOFA release. Consequently, users who have bookmarks pointing to specific material on the old sites should now update them to point to the new site.

  2010 June 22 / New member of the SOFA Board

George Hobbs, representing Commission 31 (Time), from the Australia Telescope National Facility has been co-opted onto the SOFA Board to assist in the provision of authoratative time transformation software.

  2010 March 20 / New Chair of the SOFA Board

Patrick Wallace steps down as Chair after 14 years; he is welcomed as a member of the Board. The new SOFA Board Chair is Catherine Hohenkerk who may be contacted at Catherine.Hohenkerk@ukho.gov.uk.

  2010 March 20 / www.iausofa.org

Please note that the e-mail link at the foot of each web page now points to the new SOFA mailbox at sofa@ukho.gov.uk. This replaces the old address, sofa@rl.ac.uk, at the Rutherford Appleton Laboroatory. This new contact address will be updated in the source code and documentation at the next release of the SOFA libraries.

  2010 January 27 / Issue 2009-12-31

Downloads of Issue 2009-12-31 have been resumed. Updates to the validation software have been implemented.

  2010 January 26 / Issue 2009-12-31

Downloads of Issue 2009-12-31 have been temporarily suspended pending checks on the validation software.

  2010 January 25 / www.iausofa.org

The new SOFA web site www.iausofa.org has now gone live. Requests to the old site addresses iau-sofa.hmnao.com and www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk will be automatically forwarded to the new site. Please change any bookmarks you might have to the new address.

  2010 January 25 / Issue 2009-12-31

An additional reference ellipsoid, WGS72, has been included in EFORM. A code change to GD2GC and GD2GC using ZP to zeroize a vector has been made. Corrections to comments in GC2GD and GC2GD have been made concerning routine names for inverse transformations. Comments involving references have been made to BP00, BPN2XY, C2I00A, C2I00B, C2IBPN, PN00A, PN00B, PN00, S00A, S00B, S00 and S06A. Validation software has been updated.

  2010 January 19 / www.iausofa.org released for comments by SOFA Board

A new web site for the SOFA initiative has been registered called www.iausofa.org. The material on the site has been revised and updated to improve access to the software releases and their associated explanatory material.

  2009 December 31 / Issue 2009-12-31

A new release of SOFA Fortran 77 and ANSI C libraries was generated. This includes five new Astronomy routines for performing geographic/geodetic transformations as well as a number of small cosmetic changes and code improvements. The five new routines are EFORM, GC2GD, GC2GDE, GD2GC and GD2GCE.

  2009 April 02 / Issue 2009-02-01

An error in the description of the coordinates of the Celestial Intermediate Pole with respect to the International Terrestrial Reference System in the routines C2T00A, C2T00B, C2T06A, C2TPE, C2TXY and POM00 has been corrected in both the Fortran and ANSI C libraries. These revisions have no effect on the results produced by these routines.

  2009 March 16 / Issue 2009-02-01

1. A bug affecting the routines FK52H and H2FK5 (both Fortran and ANSI C) has been corrected. This caused erroneous proper motions (and also radial velocity) to be returned.
2. The testbeds t_sofa_f.for and t_sofa_c.c have been updated to reflect the changes to FK52H and H2FK5.
3. In the C header file sofa.h, an unused reference has been removed.
4. In the C functions iauFk5hip, iauGmst00, iauObl80 and iauObl06, use of the ANSI C language feature "unary plus" has been eliminated, to avoid difficulties with older compilers.

  2009 March 13 / Issue 2009-02-01

The routines FK52H and H2FK5 (both Fortran and ANSI C) have been found to return incorrect proper motions. The fault is being rectified.

  2009 March 03 / Issue 2009-02-01

The ANSI C version of the DAT routine, iauDat, released on 2009-02-01 contained a bug that caused erroneous answers (platform dependent) for certain dates in 1972. The problem was corrected in the 2009-03-03 update. The Fortran version, iau_DAT, was not affected.

  2009 February 01 / Issue 2009-02-01

A new release of SOFA Fortran 77 and ANSI C libraries was generated. This includes the initial release of the ANSI C library. Cosmetic changes were made to a number of Fortran routines and a test program has been added.