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by gmiller123456
354 days ago
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There are a handful of Earth centered, geocentric standard reference frames. The most used today is the Geocentric Celestial Reference System (GCRS). It should be obvious that if you want to compute where to point a telescope, a transformation of coordinates will involve a step through such a coordinate system. GPS is it's own system, but there are transformations to and from the GCRS and GPS frames. Which one makes sense depends a lot on your application. |
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And yes, you can transform between GPS coordinates and GCRS (or ECI/ECEF), depending on what you’re trying to do. The key distinction I’m making is about contextual meaning and application. GPS (WGS-84) coordinates are geodetic.
Once you're transforming positions millions of kilometers away (eg. L2, the Moon, or Mars) into lat/lon/alt, you're applying a system optimized for geodesy to a domain where the altitude is arbitrary, and "longitude" rotates with Earth.