SOFA Documentation

The basic documentation for the SOFA collection is terse, consisting of (i) detailed preamble comments in the individual routines and (ii) classified and alphabetic lists of subroutine calls. These manuals (Fortran and ANSI C), which have also been split into various sections, are available with each issue, either the current issue or from the SOFA software archive.

SOFA currently offers the following cookbooks, available in pdf format.

  SOFA Tools for Earth Attitude

SOFA Tools for Earth Attitude deals with the important subset of SOFA routines concerned with the Earth's orientation and rotation. First released on 2007 August 01, this cookbook supplements the basic documentation with descriptive material and cookbook examples on the topics of precession, nutation, polar motion, sidereal time and Earth rotation angle. The examples include methods using both the equinox-based and celestial intermediate origins.

At present the examples are presented for the Fortran version. For the ANSI C-programmer, it is a simple matter of replacing the Fortran calls with the appropriate ANSI C calls.

  SOFA Time Scale and Calendar Tools

There are two versions, a Fortran 77 version and an ANSI C version of this cookbook. The texts are identical, but the code for the examples is appropriate to the particular language.

This cookbook deals with the seven time scales recognized by SOFA, namely, TAI, UTC, UT1, TT, TCG, TDB and TCB and the related civil calendar and Julian date conversions. In the case of UTC, leap seconds are dealt with correctly.