Sky Almanac#

Overview#

The sky almanac is a useful tool to plan and monitor observations. It provides sunrise/setting times and the beginning/end of each twilight. It also informs of the position in the sky of Solar System objects along with plots of elevation vs time of selected targets.

  • Located in the ts_notebooks GitHub repository, use the following notebook to access the sky almanac observing tool:

    Sky Almanac

  • An online interface with astronomical ephemeris data and daily elevation charts for your chosen targets.

    htpps://airmass.org/

Get Sun Coordinates#

Replace the time (in UTC) and run the following code in your notebook to obtain the Sun’s azimuth and elevation at your requested time.

from astropy import coordinates as coord
from astropy.time import Time

# Vera Rubin Coordinates from https://www.lsst.org/scientists/keynumbers
rubin_obs = coord.EarthLocation(
    lat='-30:14:40.68', lon='-70:44:57.90', height=2647 * u.m)

# Define time in UTC here
time = Time("2023-04-25T17:00:00", format="isot", scale="utc")

# Some calculations
sun_coordinates = coord.get_sun(time)
sun_coordinates.location = rubin_obs
where_sun = "setting" if (sun_coordinates.altaz.az.value > 180) else "rising"

# Print results
print(f" The azimuth of the {where_sun} Sun at {time} is {sun_coordinates.altaz.az.value:.2f} deg \n"
      f" The elevation of the Sun at {time} is {sun_coordinates.altaz.alt.value:.2f} deg")

This procedure was last modified Jul 02, 2024.