Abstract
Sky coverage is one of the most important pieces of information about astronomical observations. We discuss possible representations and present algorithms to create and manipulate shapes consisting of generalized spherical polygons with arbitrary complexity and size on the celestial sphere. This shape specification integrates well with our Hierarchical Triangular Mesh indexing toolbox, whose performance and capabilities are enhanced by the novel advanced features presented here. Our portable implementation of the relevant spherical geometry routines comes with wrapper functions for database queries, which are currently being used within several scientific catalog archives, including that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey, SuperCOSMOS, VISTA, Hubble Legacy Archive, and the Footprint Service of the Virtual Observatory.
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