My Brain Hurts

Okay, so astronomers working with LSST don't just use Right Ascension and Declination like everyone else. They have a whole sky-mapping system built on tracts and patches.

The best way I can describe it is to imagine the night sky is a giant quilt. A tract is a big square piece of that quilt, and a patch is a smaller square within it. I spent days just trying to figure out how to convert standard coordinates into this system. The CoordinateConverter class is finally starting to make sense, but it's been a deep dive into concepts like SpherePoint, degrees, and the difference between PARENT and LOCAL origins. Astronomy coordinate systems are wild!

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