A Python package for historical-astronomy calculations of Sun, Moon and planets.
This package can be installed using pip install histastro
. This should automatically install the
dependency packages numpy
and fortranformat
if they haven't been installed already. If you are installing
by hand, you have to ensure these packages are installed as well.
You will need to manually download the eight data files
VSOP87D.xxx
(click on FTP), one for each of the planets,
and save them in a directory of your choice (e.g. the subdirectory data/
of your working directory). To
compute the Moon position, the file moonposMeeus.csv
is needed, which can be downloaded from this page:
http://astro.ru.nl/~sluys/HistAstro/
- Radboud University: HistAstro homepage: data files and code documentation
- Pypi: HistAstro Python package
- GitHub: HistAstro source code
- Author: Marc van der Sluys
- Contact: http://astro.ru.nl/~sluys/
- Licence: GPLv3+
- Meeus, Astronomical algorithms, 2nd Ed.
- VSOP87 planet theory: Bretagnon & Francou, 1988A+A...202..309B
- VSOP87 data files
- This Python code is adapted from the Fortran implementation in libTheSky
- Celestial mechanics in a nutshell (CMiaNS)