astronomy

I've made a program that simulates movement of bodies in the solar system, however, I'm getting various inaccuracies in my results. I believe that it probably has something to do with my integration method. tl;dr there's a slight difference between the position and velocity of Earth between my simulation and NASA's data, if you could please look at my code below and tell me whether my math is wrong. The test I've ran is a 10 day long (864000 seconds) simulation, that starts at Thu Mar 13 18:30:59 2006 and ends at Thu Mar 23 18:30:59 2006 . After the simulation the program reported the

What I'm trying to do is to create a relation between an image which has been taken by a mobile phone and a constellation. Let's suppose I've been given the whole coordinates of each constellations from NASA and I can recognize some specified objects as coordinate points on the image. How can I make a relation between those different coordinates? How can I point geometrical similarities between image and any constellation? What kind of an algorithm could help the situation? Spektre I think you would be better of with comparing star position,brightness,color The outline image and constellation

I have a set of close of 10,000 points on the sky. They are plotted using the RA (right ascension) and DEC (declination) on the sky. When plotted, they take the shape of a circle. What I would like to do is to slice the circle into 8 equal parts and remove each part one at a time and do some calculations using the remaining parts. To do so I came up with this illustration in mind, i.e. slicing them using the arcs. I know that the equation of the arc is given by: S = r * theta where r --> radius theta --> angle (in our case 45 degrees) I would somehow like to do this like: slice1 = [] for a,b

I've a query on the results given by the PyEphem module relating to Observer() queries, and the effects of elevation. I understand from a couple of sources (such as http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=388 ) that the elevation of the observer has a marked effect on sunset time. However in the following code, I see next to no difference: import ephem emphemObj = ephem.Observer() emphemObj.date = '2011/08/09' emphemObj.lat = '53.4167' emphemObj.long = '-3' emphemObj.elevation = 0 ephemResult = ephem.Sun() ephemResult.compute(emphemObj) print "Sunset time @ 0m: " + str(emphemObj

I am using a function from mourner/suncalc that allows me to get the current position of our sun. With getPosition() , I want to create an animation on a image or with pure CSS (scaleable to different screen resolutions and orientations, of course), where you can see where the sun is right now in real time on the page. A totally unnecessary function but a fun function :) The image below illustrates how I am thinking. Like I said, I'll be using the getPosition() function from mourner's function which prints azimuth and altitude of the sun. The problem I am facing now, is to somehow convert this

I have an (1727,1853) size array (image), in which I have identified stars to model a point-spread function. Each index of the array corresponds to an image coordinate, however, the centroid of each star is given by a sub-pixel coordinate. I must do the following Make a 2D slice of each star. I have done this using numpy's array slicing. However, it slices by index, and I have sub-pixel centroid coordinates, thus any kind of slice I make will place the star off-center. After I make a 2D slice of each star, I must stack these arrays on top of each other to make a model of the point-spread

I am trying to build an astronomy application where I should display the stars at and near zenith for a given latitude, longitude and time. I am aware of the basics of Positional astronomy, what is puzzling me is to create database out of huge set of data! My Queries are: Which catalogue to prerfer? Like Hipparcos catalogue or Henry Draper? What are its advantages and disadvantages? What fields are required? I have identified some, but what else should be added and why? Fields identified by me: Star name, Some Unique star ID, RA, Dec, Magnitude,Color of the star. I tried to figure out from

This question has been asked before two times. In 2012, Position of the sun given time of day, latitude and longitude , Josh O'Brien gave a new version of the function sunPosition: sunPosition <- function(year, month, day, hour=12, min=0, sec=0, lat=46.5, long=6.5) { twopi <- 2 * pi deg2rad <- pi / 180 # Get day of the year, e.g. Feb 1 = 32, Mar 1 = 61 on leap years month.days <- c(0,31,28,31,30,31,30,31,31,30,31,30) day <- day + cumsum(month.days)[month] leapdays <- year %% 4 == 0 & (year %% 400 == 0 | year %% 100 != 0) & day >= 60 & !(month==2 & day==60) day[leapdays] <- day[leapdays] + 1 #