astroobs 1.3.7

Provides astronomy ephemeris to plan telescope observations

Name:

astroobs

Website:

https://github.com/ceyzeriat/astroobs

Author:

Guillaume Schworer

Version:

1.3.3beta

Astroobs provides astronomy ephemeris (airmass, azimuth, altitude, moon separation, etc) of a night sky target as a function of the date-time and the longitude/latitude of the observer. A list of international observatories is provided as well as a SIMBAD-querier to easily import targets. This package is based on pyephem ephemeris calculations. The main difference with this latter package is that astroobs provides a very straight-forward library for the observer to get the critical information in order to plan an observation. It also provides convenient turn-key tools to convert epochs and plot diagrams. It is released under the MIT license.

import astroobs.obs as obs

o=obs.Observation('vlt', local_date=(2015, 1, 1), moonAvoidRadius=15, horizon_obs = 40)
o.add_target('aldebaran')
o.add_target('canopus')
o.plot(legend=True)

aldebaran = o.targets[0]
aldebaran.whenobs(o, (2015,1,1), (2015, 2, 1))

Documentation

Refer to this page, http://pythonhosted.org/astroobs/astroobs.html

Requirements

astroobs requires the following Python packages:

• NumPy: for basic numerical routines

• Astropy: for angle units

• pyephem: for the calculations of ephemeris

• matplotlib: for plotting

• pytz: for timezones management

• re, os, sys, datetime, time: for basic stuff

astroobs is tested on Linux and Python 2.7 only, but should cross-plateform without too many issues.

Installation

If you use anaconda, the easiest and fastest way to get the package up and running is to install astroobs using conda:

$ conda install astroobs --channel astroobs

You can also install astroobs from PyPI using pip, given that you already have all the requirements:

$ pip install astroobs

You can also download astroobs source from GitHub and type:

$ python setup.py install

It is recommended that you never ever use sudo with distutils, pip, setuptools and friends in Linux because you might seriously break your system [1][2][3][4]. Options are per user directories, virtualenv or local installations.

Contributing

Code writing

Code contributions are welcome! Just send a pull request on GitHub and we will discuss it. In the issue tracker you may find pending tasks.

Bug reporting

If you think you’ve found one please refer to the issue tracker on GitHub.

Additional options

You can either send me an e-mail or add it to the issues/wishes list on GitHub.

Citing

If you use astroobs on your project, please drop me a line <mailto:{my first name}.{my family name}@obspm.fr>, you will get fixes and additional options earlier.

License

astroobs is released under the MIT license, hence allowing commercial use of the library. Please refer to the LICENSE.txt file.