Applying the same recent fixes to C and C# to the Python code.
I'm also changing my philosophy of representing times.
From now on, they will be truncated to the floor millisecond,
not rounded to the nearest millisecond. This means we don't reach
another calendar date until we have had 60 full seconds after
the last minute. Otherwise there is too much nasty logic for
rounding up calendar dates. I will follow suit across all languages.
I added the mypy option `--disallow-untyped-defs` to fail
any function lacking complete type hints.
Then I fixed all the resulting errors.
I ended up changing the Python code generator to create
some tuple types instead of list, because it is possible
to write stricter type checks that way. This was in
the Pluto and Jupiter Moon tables.
I still should come back and do the same thing for the VSOP tables.
The type checking revealed a couple of places where I wasn't
checking for a search failure. I fixed those too.
Contributor @ris-tip ran into erroneous test failures
due to tiny floating point calculation differences.
I'm adjusting the thresholds slightly so his tests will pass.
Added EclipticGeoMoon as output to the temp/*_check.txt files as 'm' lines.
This ensures that all the languages calculate nearly identical values.
Optimized EclipticGeoMoon a little more by eliminating a redundant
call to mean_obliq.
While trying to convert ecliptic coordinates from mean
equinox of date to true equinox of date, I ran into excessive
overhead from the IAU2000B nutation model. The fact that it
uses 77 trigonometric terms made the calculations a lot slower.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1112517.pdf
Page 4 in the above document mentions a shorter series
“NOD version 2” that has 13 terms instead of 77 as used in IAU2000B.
I had not noticed NOD2 before, because it appears only in
the FORTRAN version of NOVAS 3.x, not the C version.
After reading the FORTRAN code, I realized NOD2 is the same
as IAU2000B, only it keeps the first 13 of 77 terms.
The terms are already arranged in descending order of
significance, so it is easy to truncate the series.
Based on this discovery, I realized I could achieve all of
the required accuracy needed for Astronomy Engine by
keeping only the first 5 terms of the nutation series.
This tremendously speeds up nutation calculations while
sacrificing only a couple of arcseconds of accuracy.
It also makes the minified JavaScript code smaller:
Before: 119500 bytes.
After: 116653 bytes.
So that's what I did here. Most of the work was updating
unit tests for accepting slightly different calculation
results.
The nutation formula change did trigger detection of a
lurking bug in the inverse_terra functions, which convert
a geocentric vector into latitude, longitude, and elevation
(i.e. an Observer object). The Newton's Method loop in
this function was not always converging, resulting in
an infinite loop. I fixed that by increasing the
convergence threshold and throwing an exception
if the loop iterates more than 10 times.
I also fixed a couple of bugs in the `demotest` scripts.
Added Python support for user-defined stars.
Defined new StateVector methods: Position and Velocity.
Defined division operator: Vector / float.
Bumped version number to 2.1.12.
Updated CodeQL config to ignore source templates,
because they are not syntactically valid source code.
Ignore other stuff that is irrelevant to published
code quality.
Made various fixes based on helpful CodeQL analysis.
I ported the NOVAS C 3.1 functions julian_date and cal_date to Python,
and removed the dependence on the standard datetime class for calculating UT.
Now we can create Time objects for a much wider range of year values.
Simplified the julian_date formula in C and C#.
In the Python version, I had to account for a difference
in the way integer division works for negative numbers.
In Python, integer division always rounds down, not toward
zero like it does in C/C#. So I reworked the formulas to
avoid dividing a negative integer (month-14), dividing the
positive quantity (14-month) instead and toggling addition
of the term with subtraction of the term.
I use the reworked (14-month) version in C and C# for consistency.
Also, the formatting of the formula was wacky and didn't make sense,
so now it easier to read and understand.
The Python regex for parsing dates has been expanded to allow
years before 0 and after 9999.
Allow converting Python Time to string for years before 0 and after 9999.
In the unit tests for searching forward and backward
for moon phases, in addition to new moons, also test
first quarter, full moon, and third quarter.
Verify that forward and backward searches work for
100 start times between a single pair of consecutive events.
In the unit tests for searching forward and backward
for moon phases, in addition to new moons, also test
first quarter, full moon, and third quarter.
Verify that forward and backward searches work for
100 start times between a single pair of consecutive events.
The following Python functions now support searching
in forward or reverse chronological order:
SearchRiseSet
SearchAltitude
SearchHourAngle
Made some minor performance improvements to the
other implementations: return sooner if we
go past time window.
Enhanced the Python function SearchMoonPhase
to allow searching forward in time when the `limitDays`
argument is positive, or backward in time when `limitDays`
is negative.
Added unit test "moon_reverse" to verify this new feature.
The Python version of the GravitySimulator class
is now passing all unit tests. This completes
the initial coding. I still need to review
documentation across all the language implementations.
It makes more sense to report Jupiter's moons with
individually named structure fields rather than an array.
It reduces the overall code and documentation size,
and outside of unit testing, there are few cases
where iterating over an array of moons is more
lucid than using the names of the moons.
This is a breaking change, but hopefully very few
developers are using this function yet.
Fixing the breakage is very simple.
Also added operator overloads for adding and
subtracting StateVector, just like we already had
for Vector.
Added functions:
searchPlanetApsis
nextPlanetApsis
I discovered that I had an unnecessary special relaxation
of apsis error tolerance for Pluto. It turns out that currently
0.1 degrees of orbital rotation is enough for all the planets.
Search for times when the Moon ascends or descends
through the ecliptic plane. These are called
ascending and descending nodes. Added the functions:
searchMoonNode
nextMoonNode
Also corrected comments in the unit tests that
incorrectly stated nodes occur when the ecliptic
longitude is zero. They should have said the
ecliptic latitude is zero.
The existing lunar libration functions in the
other languages (C, C#, Python, JavaScript) were
calculating the Moon's ecliptic latitude and longitude
in radians, not degrees as intended. They have been fixed.
Implemented the libration function for Kotlin.
Implemented searchRelativeLongitude, which finds
planetary conjunctions and oppositions.
Discovered I can make all languages' unit tests
more strict: 6.8 minute error tolerance instead of 15.
Fixed documentation mistake in C# function SearchRelativeLongitude:
the function cannot return null. It either finds a solution time
or throws an exception.
Simplified Kotlin unit tests: use a more compact pattern of
scanning space-delimited tokens in lines.
For years before 1582 or years after 3668, the Seasons functions
were unable to find many equinoxes and/or solstices.
The problem was that over time, the Earth's axis precesses
enough that the calendar dates of these events drifts outside
the fixed search ranges I had provided for them.
I expanded the search ranges so all season changes can be found
for a much wider range of years, as verified by unit tests:
C/C++: -2000..9999
C#: 1..9999
JavaScript: -2000..9999
Python: 1..9999
Kotlin: 1..9999
Note: C#, Python, and Kotlin currently do not allow
years values below +1. In fact, I discovered we were not
noticing when an invalid year was passed into the Kotlin code.
I updated that code to throw an exception when the year does
not match what was expected. It is disturbing that the
GregorianCalendar class silently ignores invalid years!
Constricted the search tolerance from 1 second to 0.01
seconds for the seasons search, to ensure more consistent
behavior.
Fixed a bug in the Kotlin search() function's
quadratic interpolation that was causing the convergence
to be slower than it should have been.
Added the following Kotlin functions:
equatorialToEcliptic
pairLongitude
moonPhase
searchMoonPhase
searchMoonQuarter
nextMoonQuarter
Discovered I could tighten the tolerance for the moon phase
unit tests from 120 seconds to 90 seconds and they still pass.
Defined consistent __repr__ methods for
Astronomy Engine Python classes.
Each string representation is reversible:
eval(repr(x)) -> x
The main goal is to facilitate interactive
debugging and experimentation for developers
working directly in the Python interpreter.
Fixed documentation mistakes in the following classes:
IlluminationInfo
LunarEclipseInfo
Implemented Astronomy.siderealTime() in Kotlin.
Updated all languages' unit tests for sidereal time
to verify exact conformity between them, rather than
to an externally derived value. I wanted to make
sure all languages, including Kotlin, are calculating
the exact same value.
I don't need an external authoritative test for
sidereal time, because it will be indirectly tested
through its involvement in thousands of other calculations
that depend on it. I just need a quick sanity check
before implementing those other things that depend on it.
Generate astronomy.py directly in the package directory.
I realized it doesn't make sense to generate it in the
parent directory and then copy it; just generate it where
it will end up anyway.
Updated documentation so people know they can just do
pip install astronomy-engine
to install Astronomy Engine in their Python project.
Removed the GitHub Actions status badge because it is redundant with
the checkmark/X indicator.
Now that private symbols are no longer exported, I had to
fix a couple of places where the unit tests still accessed them.
There was already an internal function for calculating
Greenwich Apparent Sidereal Time (GAST). By request,
I have exposed this function for outside users.
Added a minimal unit test to verify the function is
callable and returns the correct result for one case.
This function is already exhaustively tested by unit
tests that verify other functions that already called
this function when it was internal, so minimal testing
is sufficient in this case.
Added the following new functions to all 4 languages:
MassProduct: find the GM product for all Solar System bodies.
LagrangePoint: calculate L1..L5 state vectors for a pair of bodies.
LagrangePointFast: calculate L1..L5 state vectors given
state vectors and GM products of a pair of bodies.
