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Suppose there is a geo region X. The celestial bodies move over that region over the year and, of course, the bodies do not remain the same or in the same position. I am trying to build a 2/3-D chart that maps the movement of the bodies over X (and given a certain time and place within X, show the bodies and their location at that time and place). I plan to do this using Python but at the same time lack knowledge of astronomy - Can I do it? Any pointers/modules/tutorials would help. Thanks.

askance
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    http://www.astropy.org/ – postoronnim Feb 22 '17 at 04:10
  • @postoronnim - does it require knowledge of celestial bodies, their motions? – askance Feb 22 '17 at 04:12
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    what do you mean by celestial bodies? and What precision ? For stars there are catalogs (try BSC, Hipparcos, Tycho), planets are directly computable via Kepler;s equation (up to a point). If you need also comets, Moons, planetoids, asteroids, satellites, etc then you need to use NASA effemerids and update it regularly (as they are constantly updated and can not be computed precise for long period of time) or use other service available. See [how can i correct sky map according to current time and location?](http://stackoverflow.com/a/39993115/2521214) and all the sub-links. – Spektre Feb 22 '17 at 06:31
  • @Spektre Thanks. Will look into it. – askance Feb 22 '17 at 06:58

2 Answers2

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As @postoronnim said, the astropy package provides you with everything you need for this task.

You can go here and you will have a working example.

Just a quick summary:

You can give a location for the observation (the main observatories in the planet are already available in the package but you can define your own with latitude, longitude and elevation).

Then you need coordinates of one object and the moment of the observation and you can plot a 2D (or 3D if you want to play with spherical coordinates) trajectory of you object in the sky. It is in genetal very usefull to plot Alt vs time to visualize when your object is visible.

Hope this helped

Astrom
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I would suggest you to have a glance at the opensource astronomy package stellarium with which you could simulate the sky for a given location for a given body. There should also be a documentation that accompanies that which could be helpful in getting yourself familiarised with the adopted algorithms.

mysterium
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