Query the Planet

Query http://whereistheplanet.com from Python.

There is already a Python version of whereistheplanet, but it is requires orbitize! and git-lfs, plus it is not available on PyPI.

This aims to be a lighter version with no dependencies that directly queries the website. This means it does require a network connection.

Installation

Install directly from PyPI:

python -m pip install querytheplanet

Installing for development

To install for development, first clone the repository (or ideally your fork of it), e.g.:

git clone https://github.com/vandalt/querytheplanet.git

Then install with development dependencies in editable mode:

python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

To run the tests, do:

python -m pytest

Usage

Command line

List available planets:

querytheplanet -l

Query one or more planet positions for today:

querytheplanet 51erib betapicb

Query the position of one or more planets for a given date:

querytheplanet 51erib betapicb --date 2026-05-01

Query the position of one or more planets for a multiple dates:

querytheplanet 51erib betapicb --date 2023-01-01 2026-05-01

Save the results to a CSV:

querytheplanet 51erib betapicb --date 2023-01-01 2026-05-01 --output results.csv

Display help:

querytheplanet -h

From Python

The main functionality is accessible from the querytheplanet module directly. Here is a small script with examples:

import querytheplanet as qtp

# Get a list of available planets that can be used in queries
all_planets = qtp.fetch_available_planets()

# Query a single planet's location for today
pos_df = query_planet_locations("51erib")

# Query for another date
pos_df_date =query_planet_locations("51erib", date="2025-01-01")

# Query multiple planets and multiple dates
pos_df_multi = query_planet_locations(["51erib", "betapicb"], date=["2025-01-01", "2026-05-01"])

The query outputs are always returned as pandas Dataframes. To print the outputs in a more readable format, pass verbose=True to query_planet_locations().

Attributions

This is a thin wrapper that calls http://whereistheplanet.com, maintained here: https://github.com/semaphoreP/whereistheplanet.

If you used this for your research, please cite the ASCL entry of it:

Wang, J. J., Kulikauskas, M., Blunt, S. 2021, Astrophysics Source Code Library, ascl:2101.003