Skyfield is a pure-Python astronomy package that is compatible with both Python 2 and 3 and makes it easy to generate high precision research-grade positions for planets and Earth satellites.
.. code-block:: python
from skyfield.api import load
planets = load('de421.bsp') earth, mars = planets['earth'], planets['mars']
ts = load.timescale() t = ts.now() position = earth.at(t).observe(mars) ra, dec, distance = position.radec()
print(ra) print(dec) print(distance)
The result:
::
10h 47m 56.24s +09deg 03' 23.1" 2.33251 au
Skyfield’s only binary dependency is NumPy. Once that is available, Skyfield can usually be installed with::
pip install skyfield
Here are the essential project links:
-
Home page and documentation <http://rhodesmill.org/skyfield>_. -
Installing Skyfield <http://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/installation.html>_. -
Contributing to Skyfield <https://github.com/skyfielders/python-skyfield/blob/master/Contrib.rst>_. -
Skyfield package <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/skyfield>_ on the Python Package Index. -
Issue tracker <https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-skyfield/issues>_ on GitHub.