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Showing posts from November, 2011

Planetary states API

Update: This API is deprecated. Use the new json api instead. I needed a way to deal with planetary positions and velocities and found NASA's HORIZONS and the ephemerides . But I wanted a simpler interface than telnet or lugging around the massive ephemeris files with my applications. So instead, I wrote a simple JSON api for dealing with ephemeris files. Suppose one wanted to get the chebyshev coefficients for computing mercury's state for today's date (November 5th), the URL query would look like this: http://www.astro-phys.com/api/coeffs?date=2011-11-5&bodies=mercury Which would return a JSON object whose structure looks like this: { "date": 2455870.5, "results": { {"mercury": { "coeffs": ... "start": 2455856.5, "end": 2455872.5 } } } Where "coeffs" contains the chebyshev coefficients for evaluating the state of mercury between the julian dates 2455856.5 and 245587