Astropy Ephem

This is a wrapper for the Ephem module, which uses Astropy objects. Although the Ephem module is quite powerful, its measurement objects are less well defined, and less well documented than Astropy.

This is an early development version. It requires an existing installation of Ephem.

Simple Examples

This module should work almost identically to Ephem/PyEphem, with some minor adjustments to your import statements. So if you import this module as import astropyephem as ephem, you should be able to run the Ephem examples and tutorial!

::

>>> import astropyephem as ephem
>>> u = ephem.Uranus()
>>> u.compute('1781/3/13')
>>> print('%s %s %s' % (u.ra, u.dec, u.mag))
1.46501rad 0.410996rad 5.6 mag
>>> u.ra
<Angle 1.4650062559255066 rad>
>>> type(u.ra)
astropy.coordinates.angles.Angle

Positions will be in ICRS coordinates (although you can transform to any coordinate frame you like using the full power of the astropy.coordinates package):

>>> from astropy.coordinates import *
>>> u.position
<ICRS Coordinate: ra=87.2737189688 deg, dec=23.6395924879 deg>
>>> u.transform_to(Galactic)
<Galactic Coordinate: l=184.935951366 deg, b=-2.0754155542 deg>