Bug#911646: RFP: python-skyfield -- Elegant astronomy for Python
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : python-skyfield
Version : 1.9
Upstream Author : Brandon Rhodes <brandon@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).
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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!
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