SOLARSYSTEM

Our Solar System consists of:

• our Star, the Sun
• 8 Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
• Some dwarf Planets: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, (Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, 2007 OR10, not yet included here)
• Some Centaurs: Chiron (onlyone included here)
• Many moons orbiting planets. Our Moon (Selene in Greek or Luna in Latin) is included here.

solarsystem is a python library for calculating the position (approximately) of planets around Sun or around Earth.

Also with solarsystem we can find the locations around Sun/Earth of the dwarf planets (Pluto, Ceres and Eris here), the Chiron Centaur and the location of moon around Earth.

Furthermore we compute the sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset datetimes as well as the moon phase for any given place on Earth (geocoordinates).

In addition, a set of useful functions are included for converting between coordinate systems:

• Transform spherical to rectangular projection.
• Transform rectangular to spherical projection.
• Transform ecliptic to equatorial projection.
• Transform equatorial to ecliptic projection.
• Transform eclipitc to spherical projection.
• Transform spherical to eclipitc projection.

     

Quick start

import solarsystem

Initialize class

H = solarsystem.Heliocentric(year=2020, month=1, day=1, hour=12, minute=0, precession=True)

Compute position of planets around sun

planets_dict=H.planets()
print('Planet','   \t','Longitude','   \t','Latitude','   \t','Distance in AU')
for planet in planets_dict:
    pos=planets_dict[planet]
    print(planet,'   \t',round(pos[0],2),'   \t',round(pos[1],2),'   \t',round(pos[2],2))

# Planet      Longitude   Latitude    Distance in AU
# Mercury     263.55       -4.06       0.47
# Venus         4.95       -3.22       0.73
# Earth       100.25        0.0        0.98
# Mars        214.1         0.49       1.59
# Jupiter     275.83        0.1        5.23
# Saturn      292.23        0.05      10.05
# Uranus       35.07      359.52      19.81
# Neptune     347.74       -1.04      29.91
# Pluto       292.47      359.33      33.88
# Ceres       290.44       -5.4        2.92
# Chiron        3.86        2.94      18.81
# Eris         23.08      -11.74      96.0

     

• In version 0.1.6 'precession' (of the equinoxes) was added in calculations with True been the default value.

Examples - Use Cases

• Solar System Live: https://github.com/IoannisNasios/solarsystem/blob/master/examples/Solar_System_Live.ipynb.

  • Plot planets around Sun, watch where planets are around Sun
  • Get the Geocentric positions of Sun, planets, nano planets, our Moon and 1 Centaur

• RiseSet Calendar : https://github.com/IoannisNasios/solarsystem/blob/master/examples/RiseSet_Calendar.ipynb.

  • Time of sun rise and set within each day
  • Time of moon rise and set within each day
  • Moon phase - percent of illumination

     

Documentation

The full documentation is available at solarsystem.readthedocs.io    

Alternatively you can build documentation:

install sphinx

Go to docs/ directory

cd docs

Build html files

make html

Open _build/html/index.html in browser.

     

Installation

install from Pypi:

pip install solarsystem

Latest version from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/IoannisNasios/solarsystem

     

Requirements

No requirements, no additional libraries needs to be installed.

Exceptions:

• For the example notebook Solar System Live, the matplotlib library is needed in order to view the plot
• For the python code tests, libraries pytest and numpy are required

     

Python versions

• solarsystem is tested and runs normal for python versions 3.4+ and 2.7
• running solarsystem on previous python versions should also run but use with caution.

     

Citing

If you find this library useful, please consider citing:

@misc{Nasios:2020,
  Author = {Ioannis Nasios},
  Title = {solarsystem},
  Year = {2020},
  Publisher = {GitHub},
  Journal = {GitHub repository},
  Howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/IoannisNasios/solarsystem}}
}

     

License

solarsystem is MIT-licensed. Read License