The following describes the most significant changes which
occurred in the AST library between versions V6.0-1 and V7.0.0:
- Fundamental positional astronomy calculations are now performed
using the IAU SOFA library where possible, and the Starlink PAL library SUN/268sun268
otherwise (the PAL library contains a subset of the Fortran Starlink SLALIB
library re-written in C). Copies of these libraries are bundled with AST
and so do not need to be obtained or built separately, although external
copies of SOFA and PAL can be used if necessary by including the
“–with-external_pal” option when configuring AST.