Product Overview

MEALPix is a native Matlab implementation of a substantial subset of the HEALPix subroutine library. It supports the fast and accurate statistical and astrophysical analysis of massive full-sky data sets. HEALPix is supported by NASA and ESO, used extensively by the WMAP and PLANCK missions, and is part of the official FITS World Coordinate System.

MEALPix provides fully vectorized functions for

Conversion between position angles, cartesian direction vectors, and HEALPix ring and nest pixel indexing schemes;

Spherical harmonic resolution and analysis of functions on the sphere;

Nearest pixel identification (pixels within a given disc, pixels in a ring, pixels in a HEALPix face).

MEALPix was created from the Fortran90 implementation HEALPix via a combination of hand coding and machine assisted conversion of the HEALPix F90 source code. Some routines were hand-coded based on the documented functionality of the F90 subroutines on which they were based. Other routines were hand-coded via inspection of the HEALPix F90 implementation source. Still other routines were machine converted from F90 to Matlab™ using f2matlab. In this latter case the resulting Matlab™ source was then hand-modified to vectorize the computations and take advantage of Matlab™ data types and other functions.