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skyfielders / python-skyfield

Elegant astronomy for Python
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comparison with pyephem #215

Closed anarcat closed 4 years ago

anarcat commented 6 years ago

Hello!

I found out about this only after implementing a moon phase explorer with PyEphem. To my great dismay, I discovered you actually did the right thing in Skyfield and make it easier to find arbitrary phases within a time period (as opposed to "next full" and so on). It makes my program basically moot! :)

But before I jump both feet into Skyfield, I am wondering what I would leave behind. How do features compare between the two programs? I noticed issues #115 and #30 but are there other differences?

Thanks!

brandon-rhodes commented 6 years ago

Good question! At some point I'll have to go through the complete list of PyEphem features, I suppose, and see how many still be needed in Skyfield before the two libraries are roughly equivalent. I'll keep this issue open until we have time to write something up!

wgaylord commented 5 years ago

I would like to ask if any more of the features from PyEphem has made their way into skyfield. (Like isEclipse and a few other things)

DavidSChandler commented 5 years ago

I want to be able to plot multiple comets onto a chart from a comet element database. Simple Keplerian orbits are all that is needed (assuming light travel time correction is included). I recall a note from some months ago that computing comet orbital positions from elements was not implemented but coming soon. Is it in the code now?

astrojuanlu commented 5 years ago

@DavidSChandler in the meanwhile you might want to use poliastro for that: https://docs.poliastro.space/en/stable/examples/Using%20NEOS%20package.html

brandon-rhodes commented 4 years ago

With the recent supported added to Skyfield for whether Earth satellites are in sunlight, and for comets and minor planets, I think that all of PyEphem’s functionality now exists in some form in Skyfield! It has been a long road, but I think we have substantially reached its end. I am going to therefore close this issue in a flurry of celebration — but please feel free to comment further here if you find any odds or ends of PyEphem that you think might still be missing. Thanks!