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 orbiting Earth

solarsystem is a python library for finding position of planets around Sun or around Earth.

Also with solarsystem we can find positions around Sun/Earth of dwarf planets (only 3 planets so far) and Chiron Centaur and position of moon around Earth

Furthermore we compute sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset and moon phase for given place (geocoordinates).

Except all computation above with this library a set of usefull functions are included with which we can convert 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 )

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     263.83       -4.06        0.47
# Venus       5.23         -3.22        0.73
# Earth       100.53        0.0         0.98
# Mars        214.38        0.49        1.59
# Jupiter     276.1         0.1         5.23
# Saturn      292.51        0.05        10.05
# Uranus      35.35         359.52      19.81
# Neptune     348.02       -1.04        29.91
# Pluto       292.75        359.33      33.88
# Ceres       290.87       -5.4         2.92
# Chiron      4.33          2.94        18.81
# Eris        23.55        -11.74       96.0

     

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.

Exception: example notebook Solar System Live, matplotlib is needed in order to view the plot

     

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