Astronomia - Quick Guide

Astronomia is a collection of subroutines and applications for calculating the positions of the sun, moon, planets and other celestial objects. The emphasis is on high accuracy over a several thousand year time span. Note that the techniques used are overkill for most calendar applications.

The subroutine library attempts to implement some the techniques described in Astronomical Algorithms, second edition 1998, by Jean Meeus, Willmann-Bell, Inc.

Currently there are no graphical applications apart from some demo CGI interfaces.

Astronomia will work with Python 2.6+ and 3.0+.

Documentation

Reference documentation is at http://timcera.bitbucket.io/.

Installation

At the command line:

$ pip install astronomia
# OR
$ conda install -c conda-forge astronomia

Usage

To use Astronomia in a project:

import astronomia

Development

Development is managed on bitbucket at https://bitbucket.org/timcera/astronomia/overview.

History

Astronomia is a fork of the Astrolabe library created by Bill McClain. The Astrolabe library is no longer available.

I (Tim Cera) used the Astrolabe library within my tidal analysis package TAPPy. In 2013 I pulled Astrolabe out of TAPPy and forked Astronomia. I have since fixed many bugs and added features. The most important added feature is the ability for most functions to work with array inputs. Bill McClain had dual Python and ‘C’ code, but I focused only on the Python code, updating with newer data and equations as I found them.