pympc

Perform checks for the presence of moving Solar-system bodies at astronomical locations for a given epoch.

Installation

pip install pympc

or download/clone source and:

python setup.py install

Setup

First, if we want to search for minor bodies, we need to grab the orbital elements catalogue from the Minor Planet Center. This must be done at least once prior to any searches and can be run to overwrite the catalogues with the latest versions. The default call signature is shown.

import pympc
xephem_cat =pympc.update_catalogue()
print(xephem_cat)
# e.g. /tmp/mpcorb_xephem.csv

The catalogue downloaded will be the mpcorb catalogue.

The Near Earth Asteroid and Comets catalogues will be downloaded and used to update the mpcorb entries based on the values of the include_nea and include_comets arguments (both default to True).

It will create a csv file for each catalogue downloaded in the xephem database format and return the filepath to this file. By default, the file will be saved in the user's temporary directory - this can be changed by setting the cat_dir argument.

Downloading this catalogue isn't necessary fi you just want to do major body checks (i.e. planets, moons.

Usage

Having downloaded the catalogue (see Setup), we can now search for both major and minor bodies at a given location.

Interactive searching

Note: All information is output in logging. If you do not have a lgger set up in a session, running:

import logging
fmt = "%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s"
logging.basicConfig(format=fmt, level=logging.INFO)

prior to the examples will show this information.

Within an interpretor session, define a search location, epoch and radius and run the search.

import astropy.units as u
import pympc
from astropy.time import Time

ra = 230.028 * u.deg
dec = -11.774 * u.deg
epoch = Time("2019-01-01T00:00")
search_radius = 5 * u.arcmin
observatory = 950  # observatory code for La Palma
pympc.minor_planet_check(ra, dec, epoch, search_radius, observatory=observatory)

Results are returned as an astropy table.

The above example uses explicit quantities, but if passed simple float arguments, and the program will assume the units (see comments below and pympc.minor_planet_check() docstring for unit assumptions).

import pympc
ra = 230.028  # assumed degrees
dec = -11.774  # assumed degrees
epoch = 58484.  # assumed MJD
search_radius = 30  # assumed arcseconds
observatory = 950  # observatory code for La Palma
pympc.minor_planet_check(ra, dec, epoch, search_radius, observatory=observatory)

By default, the search will use a default filepath for the catalogue. if the file has been moved - or a custom cat_dir was passed to pympc.update_catalogue() - then the filepath can be specified.

import pympc
pympc.minor_planet_check(ra=230.028, dec=-11.774, epoch=58484., search_radius=30, xephem_filepath='/path/to/mpcorb_xphem.csv')

The search will by default search both major and minor bodies. These can be toggled via the boolean arguments include_minor_bodies and include_major_bodies arguments.

Defining an observer

By default, if the observatory argument is not passed, the program will return geocentric coordinates. However, for relatively nearby objects like minor bodies, there can be signicant parallax introduced by the location of an observer on the Earth's surface. For this reason it is crucial to pass either an observatory code or a tuple containing the observatory information. See the documentation for pympc.minor_planet_check() for more details.

Console script searching

Installation of the package will create a minor_planet_check script, which can be accessed from the command line. The options follow the same as the interactive searching, and results are displayed as a table. For help on the command line use:

minor_planet_check --help

Note: It is not currently possible to pass a custom set of observatory coordinates to the script - an existing observatory code must be passed.

Major bodies (planets, moons)

Major bodies (those with a ephem.[body] object in the pyephem package) can be included in the search by adding the include_major_bodies argument to minor_planet_check() when doing interactive searches, or --match-to-major-bodies when using the console script.

Additionally, pympc can perform a Hill sphere check for a position, to ensure it is not within the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet. This is done by calling planet_hill_sphere_check() interactively, or adding --hill_sphere_check to the console script.

Example of a minor Jovian moon

minor_planet_check 69.122371 21.11505 60695.428680 --match-to-major-bodies -r 5 --hill-sphere-check

This object is not in the major body catalogue of pyephem, but does provide a match to Jupiter's Hill sphere. Output:

Major and Minor Planet Check:
No major or minor bodies found.
Planet Hill Sphere Check:
  name          ra               dec             separation      mag 
------- ----------------- ------------------ ------------------ -----
Jupiter 69.83640596092219 21.603370530186574 2970.0900089441457 -2.46

Speed and multiprocessing

The major body check takes much less than one second. The minor body check should take of order a few seconds, depending on multiprocessing capabilities.

The private function which actually performs the calculation is _minor_planet_check() (note leading underscore). This can be called directly, to avoid the overhead associated with converting input arguments in minor_planet_check(), if you provide them directly as required (see _minor_planet_check() docstring). Note that in this case a list of tuples is returned, rather than an astropy table.

By default, the program does calculate positions of bodies in the catalogue multiprocessed. To switch this off set chunk_size = 0, i.e.:

import pympc
pympc.minor_planet_check(ra=230.028, dec=-11.774, epoch=58484., search_radius=30, chunk_size=0)

Limitations

1. The orbits are propagated following xephem (via the pyephem package), and this does not account for perturbations of the orbits. Thus, the accuracy of the position is dependent on the time difference between the epoch of the orbit elements and the epoch at which the search is being performed. Epoch differences between orbital elements calculation and observation of a few months or less will provide typical positional accuracies of less than a few arcsecond for the vast majority of minor bodies. If the Minor Planet Center orbit epoch becomes many months out of date, then large separations are to be expected. Note, additinoally, that a small number of bodies (those undergoing strong perturbations and close to Earth) may be quite inaccurate (arcminutes) even at modest time differences between the search and orbit elements epochs. A fuller analysis is given in notebooks/positional_accuracy.ipynb, with the following histogram showing the results.

Note: For this reason, pympc is not suitable to historical searches of positions since the Minor Planet Center do not make available historical orbit elements catalgoues. It is intended for near real-time searches.

2. The xephem package, used to calculate positions, can only provide geocentric astrometric positions. pympc will calculate the topocentric correction as a post-processing to the initial position. The simple topometric correction applied is more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of minor bodies, but for some near earth objects the correction can be large and the relatively simple treatment by pympc may not be sufficient. Additionally, in order to find matches in geocentric positions prior to applying the topocentric correction, a buffer is added to the search radius - this should capture the vast majority of cases where the geocentric position is outside the seach radius but the topocentric position is within it - unless the object is within ~1/3 AU of Earth. To work around this you can artifically inflate your search radius and filter yourself afterwards.

3. The filtering of matches based on magnitude via max_mag argument to minor_planet_check() is limited by the accuracy of the magnitude information in the database so some buffer should be applied to the desired magnitude cutoff to allow for this.

Acknowledgements

This package makes use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

Orbit elements are also sourced from Lowell Observatory, which is funded by the Lowell Observatory Endowment and NASA PDART grant NNX16AG52G.

Based from a package developed by Chris Klein and Duncan Galloway.