[Proj] The world of ECEF aka geocentric coordinates

[Eric Miller]

>>> On 2/4/2009 at 10:58 AM, "Gerald I. Evenden" <geraldi.evenden at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 February 2009 1:19:13 pm Karney, Charles wrote:
>> > From: Clifford J Mugnier [cjmce at lsu.edu] 
>> > Date: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 10:51
>> >
>> > I find Wiki stuff garbage and worthless ...
>>
>> My overall take on Wikipedia is that it's a fabulous resource.
>> Certainly there's some garbage in it.  However, I find that it's
>> reasonably easy to spot this.  If you smell a rat, you can check the
>> editing history; or it can be the starting point for checking other
>> sources.
>> --
>> Charles Karney <ckarney at sarnoff.com>
>> Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton, NJ 08543-5300
> 
> I second that and it is one of the first places I go to for information.  
> But 
> depending upon what I am after, I often followup on additional sites.
> 
> At the moment, I have not figured out their editing operations.  I wanted to 
> 
> add to the comments about the z axis but gave up after it looked like I 
> would 
> have to spend an afternoon learning their system.   :-(

The WGS84 documentation describes the positive z-axis as going through the north pole as defined by ...  ECEF is mentioned in section 2.1 (TR8350.2).  There can be many ECEF reference frames or coordinate systems.  I'm not convinced they all have to be "right-handed" cartesian systems like WGS84.  But, maybe they do?  It'd be helpful to know the origin of the term.