SIMBAD, ruby, and a little bit of hacking

Caution: Contains geekness

Following Al's suggestion in a comment yesterday, I decided to take a look at the name resolver web service. Never having worked with this sort of stuff before it took a little bit of reading (even more so since perl and me fell out a long time ago so I tend to use ruby when messing about with script-like stuff) but I finally got something up and running.

I've knocked together a very simply test script called aresolve. The only point of it is to take a name of something on the command line and print some information about it (in this case the RA/Dec and all aliases).

And it works:

davep@hagbard:~/temp$ ./aresolve M45
RA...: 56.8500000
Dec..: +24.1166667
Alias: M 45
Alias: C 0344+239
Alias: Cl Melotte 22
Alias: H 0346+24
Alias: [KPR2004b] 47
Alias: NAME PLEIADES
Alias: NAME SEVEN SISTERS
Alias: OCl 421.0

Sweet!

Yes, I know, to those who do this sort of stuff every day it's probably no big deal but, well, you know, when you try something yourself for the first time...

So, thanks to Al, I've got a solution. Now to go find a problem...