The demo program ecliptic_of_date.py shows how to
calculate the true ecliptic of date (ECT) angular coordinates
of the Sun, Moon, and planets for an observer somewhere on the Earth.
It calculates the equatorial of date (EQD) coordinates, then uses
a rotation matrix to convert the vector to ECT, then converts
the vector to spherical coordinates: latitude, longitude, and distance.
Tonight as I was walking outside, I saw a fairly bright
star about half a degree away from the edge of the Moon.
I wondered what it was, so I decided to write a quick
program to find out.
This Python demo program scans the HYG Database
(https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database)
to find which bright stars are within a small angular
distance of the Moon, as seen at a given time, latitude, and longitude.
It turns out the star I saw was Nunki (Sigma Sagittarii).
It was handy to do vector subtraction to implement this program,
and it was trivial to do in the Python code's Vector class,
so I went ahead and added that.
I already had the function ObserverVector that converts geographic
coordinates (latitude, longitude, elevation) to an equatorial-of-date
(EQD) vector.
Now I'm in the process of adding the inverse function VectorObserver
that calculates geographic coordinates from an EQD vector.
This commit implements VectorObserver in Python.
The other languages will follow in future commits.
The motivation was from the following request:
https://github.com/cosinekitty/geocalc/issues/1
The goal is to find the near-intersection between two different lines
of sight from two different observers on the Earth's surface.
Added a demo program triangulate.py that solves this problem.
Finished the script demos/python/lunar_angles.py
that shows how to search for times when the Moon and other
solar system bodies reach apparent ecliptic longitude separations
as seen from the Earth.
This is also a good demo of how to perform a custom search
for events using Astronomy Engine. This is the same technique
used internally by Astronomy Engine to search for lunar phases,
eclipses, solstices, etc.
The demo shows how to correct for light travel
time to render Jupiter's moons as they appear
from the Earth.
Created an addition operator for the Vector
class in the Python code, because it is handy.
Corrected a bug in the string representation
of the Python StateVector class.
Created skeleton test harness for validating the demo programs.
Created stub moonphase.py.
Copied correct demo program outputs from nodejs; will tweak as needed.
Call the Python demo test harness from the 'run' script.
