nightflight

This is a very small library that leverages the astral package to calculate how much of a flight occurs during regulatory night time (30 minutes after sunset to 30 minutes before sunrise).

This calculation is somewhat complicated because sunset and sunrise are a function of location, and location is changing rapidly during a flight.

Positions and times during the flight are approximated by assuming that the flight follows a great circle track between origin and destination and that velocity is constant throughout.

The latter assumption is likely the greatest source of error, since average velocity along the great circle track will be much lower during the initial and terminal manoeuvring phases.

The assumption of great circle track may also be erroneous on very long trips. If a trip starts on exactly opposite sides of the planet, there are an infinite number of equally efficient tracks to choose from, so when the situation is close to this, the actual track flown may end up being radically different from that assumed.

The main function takes n_vectors (vectors normal to the tangent plane at a given location) as arguments to avoid dealing with singularities. A database of n_vectors for airfields as designated by their three letter IATA code or four letter ICAO codes is included. This data is a processed version of the database generously provided by ourairports.com (see https://ourairports.com/). The make_locations module has a to_nvec function to convert an arbitrary latitude and longitude to an n_vector .