Ellipsoid.compute_albedos

giant.ray_tracer.shapes.ellipsoid:

Ellipsoid.compute_albedos(self, body_centered_vecs)

This method computes the surface albedo for a location on the surface of the ellipsoid expressed in the principal frame of the ellipsoid.

The input should be the body centered vectors in the principal frame (that is the vector from the center of the body to a point on the surface).

This method does not check that the point is on the surface, so if you provide a point that is not on the surface of the ellipsoid you will get undefined results.

The albedo is either returned as 1 (if no albedo map is attached to this ellipsoid) or is computed using the albedo_map attribute after converting the centered surface locations into longitude, latitude values in radians (longitude going from 0 to 2*np.pi). Either way the result is returned as a numpy array of length n

Parameters:

body_centered_vecs (np.ndarray) – a 3xn array of centered surface locations where each column represents a new location

Returns:

The surface albedo at each surface location provided as a lenght n numpy array

Return type:

np.ndarray