Acknowledgements

SLALIB is descended from a package of routines written for the AAO 16-bit minicomputers in the mid-1970s. The coming of the VAX allowed a much more comprehensive and thorough package to be designed for Starlink, especially important at a time when the adoption of the IAU 1976 resolutions meant that astronomers would have to cope with a mixture of reference frames, timescales and nomenclature.

Much of the preparatory work on SLALIB was done by Althea Wilkinson of Manchester University. During its development, Andrew Murray, Catherine Hohenkerk, Andrew Sinclair, Bernard Yallop and Brian Emerson of Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office were consulted on many occasions; their advice was indispensable. I am especially grateful to Catherine Hohenkerk for supplying preprints of papers, and test data. A number of enhancements to SLALIB were at the suggestion of Russell Owen, University of Washington, the late Phil Hill, St Andrews University, Bill Vacca, JILA, Boulder and Ron Maddalena, NRAO. Mark Calabretta, CSIRO Radiophysics, Sydney supplied changes to suit Convex. I am indebted to Derek Jones (RGO) for introducing me to the ``universal variables'' method of calculating orbits.

The first C version of SLALIB was a hand-coded transcription of the Starlink Fortran version carried out by Steve Eaton (University of Leeds) in the course of MSc work. This was later enhanced by John Straede (AAO) and Martin Shepherd (Caltech). The current C SLALIB is a complete rewrite by the present author and includes a comprehensive validation suite. Additional comments on the C version came from Bob Payne (NRAO) and Jeremy Bailey (AAO).