[QGIS-Developer] Sunrise, Sunset, Lunar Calculations

[Nyall Dawson]

On Tue, 2 Jul 2019 at 01:58, C Hamilton <adenaculture at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Before I go too far with this I want to check to see if the following package could be used in QGIS.
>
> astropy (https://www.astropy.org/) has a modified BSD-2 license. See https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/master/LICENSE.rst
>
> This would be the library I would pick. It might be an overkill, but in the long run it could also be used by anyone with imagery from the Moon, Venus, Mars or any of the planets and it would have all the necessary functions they would need. The activity on the project is very high. One thing I have not checked is to see if their algorithms are historically and anciently accurate which would be of interest to archaeologists.
>
> An astropy add on is astroplan (https://astroplan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) which has the same license and has a number of utilities that use astropy that calculate sunrise, sunset, moon phase and illumination. It is not as actively developed, but it may not need to be.
>
> Skyfield (https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/, https://github.com/skyfielders/python-skyfield/) seems to have a lot of the basic routines, but it is primarily developed by one person. It has a MIT license, but seems to be actively developed. This might be my second choice of libraries.

The problem with both those libraries is that they are Python only --
this eliminates them as options, since we need c or c++ for it to be
usable in the 3d engine.

Nyall