[QGIS-Developer] Earth, Sun, Moon & Planets Plugin

[C Hamilton]

I want to give you a heads up that I am working on a plugin to display the
position of the sun and moon at their zenith (directly overhead) as well as
the day/night boundary for a particular date and time.  I could easily
include the planets as well. So far the plugin can display the region of
civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight, and night. This
is what I have so far. You can see the sun, moon, and day/night boundaries.
The plugin automatically styles it as shown and the algorithms are
processing algorithms.

[image: earthsunmoon.jpg]

My next step will be to have an interactive interface that will display the
above but with a 24 hour time slider that will dynamically change these
plots as the time slider is moved. Also the ability to click on the map and
have it display information about sunrise, sunset dusk, altitude and
azimuth for both the sun and moon at that location. I may have it also
display information about the equinoxe, and solstices for the year.

I am using the python library Skyfield which bases all its calculations on
the JPL ephemeris data so it is highly accurate. The challenge is that
Skyfield uses the library sgp4 which seems to be platform dependent. If
there is enough interest then I will see if the QGIS team would be willing
to include them with the QGIS distribution. There is one large file that
the user would also need to download which is the JPL ephemeris. The one I
am using is 100 mb, but it also includes the ephemeris for all the planets
as well with a large time span in the past and future.

I am interested in how much interest there is in the QGIS community for
these capabilities. I should have a plugin demo in several weeks for anyone
who wants to test it.

Thanks,

Calvin
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