Comment 1 for bug 774177

Well, this brings up a thorny issue. PyEphem intends that all angles be floating-point radians, but which will “print themselves out” in a more convenient format like angles of RA or degrees of pretty much anything else. In addition, when setting an angle, you can pass a string with RA or degrees, like “3:14:58.8” and PyEphem will convert it for you.

So the intention, when the docstring says “(degrees)”, is to define what format the *string* version takes. For people who encounter the idea in the tutorial first, this has been working. But I'd not thought about people who encounter the docstring first; obviously, it can confuse them!

I could expand all of those parenthetics to say something like “(radians printed as degrees)” or “displayed as degrees” or something like that, but let me think for a few days about what way of putting it might cause the least confusion — and let me know if you yourself have any ideas!