Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist * Package name : python-skyfield Version : 1.9 Upstream Author : Brandon Rhodes <bran...@rhodesmill.org> * URL : https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ * License : MIT/X Programming Lang: Python Description : Elegant astronomy for Python
Skyfield is a pure-Python astronomy package that is compatible with both Python 2 and 3 and makes it easy to generate high precision research-grade positions for planets and Earth satellites. Skyfield computes positions for the stars, planets, and satellites in orbit around the Earth. Its results should agree with the positions generated by the United States Naval Observatory and their Astronomical Almanac to within 0.0005 arcseconds (which equals half a “mas” or milliarcsecond). ==== Brandon Rhodes is the author of PyEphem, already packaged in Debian, but he's now working on a replacement called Skyfield which seems to be better designed. For example, I had to write a lot of boilerplate code to come up with a moon phase generator here: https://gitlab.com/anarcat/undertime/blob/master/moonphases.py while it's only 5 lines of code in skyfield: https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/almanac.html#phases-of-the-moon It's not completely clear to me what the difference is between the two projects, so I have asked upstream for a clarification: https://github.com/skyfielders/python-skyfield/issues/215 I don't have time to maintain it but it seems to me it should be maintained as part of the astro team like pyephem. Thanks!
