Replace localization uncertainty properties with one error radius #124
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Replace the localization properties
uncertainty_shape
,ra_uncertainty
,dec_uncertainty
, andposition_angle
with a single property calledra_dec_error
.The original localization uncertainty properties were ill-conceived in many ways:
The names
ra_uncertainty
anddec_uncertainty
were misleading. For example, for ellipses, these fields actually represented the lengths of the semi-major and semi-minor axes, and not the uncertainty in ra or dec.The names of these properties were inconsistent with other schema. Every other uncertainty property exept for these has a name ending in
_error
, not_uncertainty
.The
rectangle
shape was not useful. The most significant examples of quadrilateral localization regions are IPN error boxes. However, these are parallelograms, not rectangles, so the shape would have been under-specified.We have observed that all current missions in GCN either report error circles or HEALPix maps. Given that observation, this patch replaces all of the ill-conceived localization properties with a single
ra_dec_error
field which is the radius in degrees of the error circle.In the future, there might be a mission that requires ellipses. We won't deal with that now, but in that event we would have a few different backwards-compatible options. For example, we could:
Treat the
ra_dec_error
field as the semi-major axis, and add optional fieldsra_dec_error_b
andra_dec_error_pa
for the semi-minor axis and the position angle, respectively; orAllow
ra_dec_error
to be either a single scalar, or an array of up to three numbers, representing the semi-major axis, semi-minor axis, and position angle, respectively.Fixes #120.