visky 0.0.0

Given an earth location, plot lines of constant hour angle and declination on an azimuth-elevation grid

visky

A library to help generate VIsualize the celestial SKY. Given an earth location, plot lines of constant hour angle and declination on an azimuth-elevation grid.

An example output for the Canadian Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatories 26 m telescope location.

An example output for the Australian Telescope National Facilities Parkes telescope location.

Installation

It is available on pip. Otherwise you can clone this repo and figure it out yourself - this library is a uv project.

pip install visky

How to use

from visky import hadec_on_azel_grid, EarthLocation

# EarthLocation is a thin wrapper around astropy.coordinates.EarthLocation and can be used in a few ways:
location = EarthLocation.of_site('parkes')
location = EarthLocation.from_geodetic(lat = 49.32102306, lon = -119.61898028, height = 546.566)

figure = hadec_on_azel_grid(location)  # this is a plotly figure
figure.show()  # will plot it using the default plotly backend
figure.update_layout(title="My plot title")
figures.write_image('myplot.png')

To do

• Implement plotting of HA/Dec lines on Az/El grid
• Add interactive features to the plot
• Support southern hemisphere locations (SCP instead of NCP)
• Tidy up plot artifacts at various earth locations (lines suddenly veering off or disappearing)
• Add more documentation and usage examples
• Package as a pip-installable module
• Tidy up inline annotations on the plot (works well in north sky, but equator and south are funky)

Credit

Tim Robishaw had generated a plot like this that I referenced a lot, and I ripped many elements from it.