HistAstro

A Python package for historical-astronomy calculations of Sun, Moon and planets.

Installation

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.

Data files

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/

HistAstro pages

• Radboud University: HistAstro homepage: data files and code documentation
• Pypi: HistAstro Python package
• GitHub: HistAstro source code

Author and licence

• Author: Marc van der Sluys
• Contact: http://astro.ru.nl/~sluys/
• Licence: GPLv3+

References

• 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)