tess-ephem

Where are Solar System objects located in TESS FFI data?

tess-ephem is a user-friendly package which enables users to compute the positions of Solar System objects -- asteroids, comets, and planets -- in the data archive of NASA's TESS Space Telescope.

Installation

python -m pip install tess-ephem

Example use

tess-ephem allows you to search the entire archive of TESS FFI's for the presence of a known minor planet, and obtain the result as a Pandas DataFrame. For example:

>>> from tess_ephem import ephem
>>> ephem("Sedna")
                         sector  camera  ccd       column          row
time
2018-11-16 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1543.312296  1102.821559
2018-11-17 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1545.160910  1102.880825
2018-11-18 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1547.011351  1102.934375
...
2018-12-09 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1584.585407  1102.239292
2018-12-10 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1586.245261  1102.132304
2018-12-11 00:00:00.000       5       1    4  1587.906380  1102.012091

You can also obtain the ephemeris for one or more specific times by passing the time parameter:

>>> ephem("Sedna", time="2018-11-21 17:35:00")
                         sector  camera  ccd       column          row
time
2018-11-21 17:35:00.000       5       1    4  1553.887838  1103.048431

Additional physical parameters can be obtained by passing the verbose=True parameter:

>>> ephem("Sedna", time="2018-11-21 17:35:00", verbose=True)
                         sector  camera  ccd       column          row  pixels_per_hour        ra      dec    vmag  sun_distance  obs_distance  phase_angle
time
2018-11-21 17:35:00.000       5       1    4  1553.887838  1103.048431         0.074054  57.05786  7.63721  20.612     84.942885     83.975689       0.1419