NAME

Montenbruck - Lightweight Ephemeris

DESCRIPTION

Library of astronomical calculations, based mainly on "Astronomy On The Personal Computer" by O.Montenbruck and T.Phleger, Fourth Edition, Springer-Verlag, 2000.

There are many astronomical libraries available in the public domain. While giving accurate results, they often suffer from lack of convenient API, documentation and maintainability. Most of the source code is written in C, C++ or Java, and not dynamic languages. So, it is not easy for a layman to customize them for her custom application, be it an online lunar calendar, or tool for amateur sky observations. This library is an attempt to find a middle-ground between precision on the one hand and compact, well organized code on the other.

Accuracy

As authors of the book state, they have tried to obtain an accuracy that is approximately the same as that found in astronomical yearbooks.

"The errors in the fundamental routines for determining the coordinates of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets amount to about 1″-3″."

-- Introduction to the 4-th edition, p.2.

MODULES

• Astro::Montenbruck::MathUtils — Core mathematical routines.

• Astro::Montenbruck::Time — Time-related routines.

• Astro::Montenbruck::Ephemeris — Positions of celestial bodies.

• Astro::Montenbruck::CoCo — Coordinates conversions.

• Astro::Montenbruck::NutEqu — Nutation and obliquity of ecliptic.

• Astro::Montenbruck::RiseSet — Rise, set, transit and twilight times.

• Astro::Montenbruck::Lunation — Lunar phases.

• Astro::Montenbruck::SolEqu — Solstices and equinoxes

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE

The project is also hosted on Github. Please, visit https://github.com/skrushinsky/astro-montenbruck. You may contribute to the project by many different ways, starting from refining and correcting its documentation, especially if you are a native English speaker, and ending with improving the code base. Any kind of testing and suggestions are welcome.

You may follow the standard Github procedures or, in case you are not comfortable with them, just send your suggestions to the author by email.

AUTHOR

Sergey Krushinsky, <krushi at cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2010-2022 by Sergey Krushinsky

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.