2MASS J04355524+1630331
"
to determine its sky position,
following the specifications in the document
http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/vizier/Dic/iau-spec.htx.
Obviously, this only works where the sequence part of the designation takes one of the family of coordinate-based forms.
Note: this function should be used with considerable care. Such designators are intended for object identification and not for communicating sky positions, so that the resulting positions are likely to lack precision, and may be inaccurate. If positional information is available from other sources, it should almost certainly be used instead. But if there's no other choice, this may be used as a fallback.
Note also
that a designator with no coordsystem-specific flag character
(a leading "J
", "B
" or "G
")
is considered to be B1950, not J2000.
null
if no position can be decoded