mariocannistra / radio-astronomy-fftw Goto Github PK

Hi Mario,

I've been trying to get jpredict.py to work and I'm not sure if the problems I'm having are because of the fact that I'm in Australia or because the underlying ephem library has changed and no longer correctly works with your program.

If I specify the location in radioConfig.py to be:

stationTimezone = "Australia/Melbourne"
stationLat = "37.97252 S"  # enter your station latitude here with this string format "00.00000 X"  where X is either N or S (North or Sud)
stationLon = "145.49552 E"  # enter your station longitude here with this string format "00.00000 X"  where X is either E or W (East or West)
stationElev = 300   # enter your station elevation in meters (above sea level)

Then after they've been set by:

ephempos.lon  = float(radioConfig.stationLon[0:-2])             #Note that lon should be in string format
ephempos.lat  = float(radioConfig.stationLat[0:-2])             #Note that lat should be in string format

I get what looks like nonsensical values if I print ephem.lon and ephem.lat with:

print (ephempos.lat)
print (ephempos.lon)

as it shows me:

2175:39:54.5
8336:16:45.2

I think there are two reasons for this.

1. The code doesn't convert southerly values to negative (same for westerly I'd guess).
2. The pyephem code seem to expect string values, so the float() conversion is probably wrong.

If instead I hardwire in my location to jpredict.py with:

# Quick hack
ephempos.lon = "-37.972525"
ephempos.lat = "145.49555"

which results in correct looking values for my lat/lon

145:29:44.0
-37:58:21.1

I instead get an error from pyephem that says:

ephem.NeverUpError: 'Jupiter' transits below the horizon at 2018/5/5 02:47:13

Which is wrong as Jupiter is visible in the nights sky here at the moment.

Any ideas? I'm not a Python programmer so I'm struggling here.. :-(

Thanks!
Chris

Currently if you edit radioConfig.py to configure your location git will want to track those changes, and should the config file change in future you'll need to resolve that conflict.

It would be cleaner if the file in git was renamed to be radioConfig.py.example so that sites can copy it to be radioConfig.py and then modify it to suite. Then when changes happen they can merge them by hand without disturbing the state of the git repository locally.

How does that sound?

All the best!
Chris

Hi there,

It would be useful to allow a site to set the value of predictdays for jpredict.py in their local radioConfig.py configuration to avoid having to change the source code directly.

All the best!
Chris

Hi Mario,
One final idea from myself, when I go "git status" I see:

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

        Leap_Second.dat
        de421.bsp
        deltat.data
        deltat.preds
        jup310.bsp
        jup310.bsp.download
        radioConfig.py

It might be an idea to add them to .gitignore to stop git complaining.

All the best!
Chris