Don Cross 90a9839d18 Optimize for map-making calculation patterns. ...

See this discussion:
https://github.com/cosinekitty/astronomy/issues/150

For the case of calculating a map, where each pixel
on the map represents a different location on the Earth,
it is more efficient to factor out expensive calculation
of sidereal times, assuming the entire map represents
some phenomenon at a single moment in time.

For example, to determine whether the Moon is visible
at different places on the Earth, the following
functions can be calculated across thousands of
different (lat, lon) geographic coordinates around
the world:

    ObserverVector
    Rotation_EQD_HOR

Before iterating over the map pixels, a program
can call GeoMoon, then convert EQJ coordinates to EQD.

Then by passing the same time value in a loop to
ObserverVector and Rotation_EQD_HOR, the program
can calculate a vector from the observer to the Moon
in EQD coordinates, then convert EQD to HOR.
The z-coordinate of the horizontal coordinates
determines whether the Moon is above or below the
observer's horizon at that point on the Earth.

This calculation pattern performed redundant
sidereal time calculations for each pixel on the map.
I changed the code for all 4 languages to cache
sidereal time so that it only needs to be calculated
once.

In the C version of Astronomy Engine, this resulted
in a speedup factor of about 2.3 in the above use case.
(See the function MapPerformanceTest in generate/ctest.c.)

2022-01-22 20:47:46 -05:00

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