Finding Principal Null Direction for Numerical Relativists

We present a new method for finding principal null directions (PNDs). Because our method assumes as input the intrinsic metric and extrinsic curvature of a spacelike hypersurface, it should be particularly useful to numerical relativists. We illustrate our method by finding the PNDs of the Kastor-Traschen spacetimes, which contain arbitrarily many $Q=M$ black holes in a de Sitter back-ground.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX style, WU-AP/38/93. Figures are available (hard copies) upon requests [[email protected] (H.Shinkai)