Is H3 adequate for generic sphere tilling?

Question

Is it possible to use the H3 grid system for celestial tilling? I want to use the (alpha, delta)=(right ascension, declinaison) coordinate system (equatorial coordinate system) to assign a point/galaxy to a tile and then collect all the points (galaxies) of a particular tile, find the neighboring tiles, and get an unique indexing of the tiles.

Answer 1

This should be fine, as long as you have function to transform equatorial coordinates into lat/long coordinates. The inputs for H3 are expected to be lat/long points, specified as either degrees (for most of the bindings, e.g. h3-js and h3-py), or radians (for the core C library). Assuming you have a function to translate the (ascension, declination) tuple to a (lat, long) tuple, then H3 should be entirely adequate as a grid system for any spherical coordinates.

The only Earth-centric aspects of H3 are:

• The initial orientation of the icosahedron the grid is based on, which is optimized to place the vertices in Earth's oceans

• Any functions like hexArea or edgeLength which output units of kilometers or meters based on the Earth's radius.

Other than these, the grid system should work for any spherical context.