PAL¶
PAL stands for Positional Astronomy Library it provides standard routines for astronomical calculations. The PAL library is a partial re-implementation of Pat Wallace’s popular SLALIB library written in C using a Gnu GPL license and layered on top of the IAU’s SOFA library (or the BSD-licensed ERFA) where appropriate. SLALIB is an old Fortran library which was translated into c, it is no longer updated, has a weird license, and is hard to find.
IceCube’s astronomical coordinate software astro requires PAL to work. The PAL source code is available on github, but it is difficult to compile. A fork provided by IceCube which is much easier to compile is available from the IceCube github repository, it depends on a library called ERFA.
Apple Mac OS X¶
On MAC OS X, homebrew can be used:
brew tap IceCube-SPNO/homebrew-icecube
brew install pal
for other systems it must be installed from source.
Install from Source¶
PAL depends on a library called ERFA which can be downloaded from github.
git clone https://github.com/liberfa/erfa
cd erfa
./bootstrap.sh
./configure
make
make install
For Ubuntu you may also have to install autoconf and libtool, depending on your specific distribution. :
PAL can be installed by downloading from github and compiling:
git clone https://github.com/IceCube-SPNO/pal
cd pal
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
