Where can I find the positions of the planets, stars, moons, artificial satellites, etc. and visualize them?

Question

What resources are available to find the positions of planets, stars, moons, artificial satellites, asteroids, and other heavenly bodies?

Answer 1

There are many resources online, so this is a community wiki answer. Please feel free to add to it!

• If you want to visualize the stars/planets/etc (as viewed from Earth or another location), you are looking for planetarium software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarium_software

• If you want accurate positions for stars/planets/etc, you are looking for horizons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPL_Horizons_On-Line_Ephemeris_System

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons

• If you want to compute star/planet positions yourself, you have several options:

  • SPICE (http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/tutorials.html) will give you results that match HORIZONS very closely. You can also use some of SPICE's functionality online at http://wgc.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/webgeocalc/#NewCalculation

  • SPK (Spice kernel) files are available at https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/spk/ -- while these are primarily intended for use with CSPICE, the format is documented and you can use it directly. It's described at https://github.com/skyfielders/python-skyfield/issues/19 and implemented in Python at https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-jplephem/tree/master/jplephem

  • If you want to do the SPICE computations yourself (numerically solving the differential equations), see https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/13491/21

  • You might also want to use an n-body simulator to do the computations yourself: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25241/what-open-source-n-body-codes-are-available-and-what-are-their-features

  • IAU SOFA (http://www.iausofa.org/) will give you the International Astronomical Union's "official" libraries to compute positions.

  • VSOP theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSOP_%28planets%29) is another option.

  • PyEphem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyEphem), which derives from MIT's libastro library (https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/project/xephem/src/xephem-3.5.2/libastro/)

  • Skyfield: https://github.com/skyfielders/python-skyfield

  • libnova (http://libnova.sourceforge.net/)

  • If you want to treat planetary orbits as simple ellipses and ignore perturbations, you can find orbital elements at https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/p_elem_t1.txt but you'll probably want to visit https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?bodies#elem first

  • VSOP87-multilang Implements the VSOP87 theory in over a dozen different programming languages.

Note that these computational libraries don't always agree with each other or with planetarium software:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16293146

• If you want a catalog of stars/etc, NOMAD (http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astrometry/optical-IR-prod/nomad) and GAIA (http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/) are the largest such catalogs (about 1 billion entries each, lots of overlap). The NOMAD link also provides references to smaller catalogs.

• For star names, https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_stars/ has an official list and Stellarium has several lists in the subdirectories of https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/tree/master/skycultures in files named star_names.fab (including the official IAU list)

• For high-resolution astrophotography try ALADIN (http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/#AladinLite)

• If you want to find artificial satellites and spacecraft, start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-line_element_set

• Transits of Mercury and Venus across the Sun? http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/transit.html

• Planetary conjunctions?
  http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/ast/conjun/conjun.html

• Occultations of stars by asteroids? The International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) at http://occultations.org/

• Create your own Sun-Earth-Moon model by using a ~17 inches (~44 cm) beach ball or box as the Sun, 4-5 mm object like a pencil eraser as the Earth and a 1 mm sized drill bit or other object to represent the Moon. Then, find a 150-foot string or tape measure. The sun and earth are ~154 feet (~46m) apart. The earth and moon are ~4.7 inches (12 cm) apart.

Answer 2

To add to the excellent answer by barrycarter, there are 2 planetarium-like codes, that I know of, that run on a mac and would make excellent tools for viewing certain astronomical objects. The codes are Stellarium and Celestia. Both turn your computer into your own planetarium where you can search and view objects in space.