Comment 11 for bug 965811

Christoph, a user has just asked a question on Stack Overflow which also involves radec_of(), but the situation is much simpler: I am going to have to figure out why the south celestial pole is not coming out exactly at the south celestial pole! So that should give me a more constrained problem to solve, that then might fix radec_of in a way that will improve the answer you are getting here.

As to your usage question: is there any chance that you could ask on Stack Overflow? That gives me the chance to keep improving and editing my answer — as well as to have other people weigh in with answers of their own in case I get something wrong — and also will help other people to find the answer themselves in the future. Once we have figured out how to do your coordinate transforms, I can also add some instructions to this document, which I think should include information on taking an RA and dec and changing them into altitude and azimuth:

http://rhodesmill.org/pyephem/coordinates.html

Thanks!