Planet Positions in the Solar System

The purpose of this demo is to demonstrate the ability of sunpy to get the position of planetary bodies im the solar system.

First the imports

from astropy.coordinates import SkyCoord
from sunpy.coordinates import get_body_heliographic_stonyhurst
from astropy.time import Time
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

Lets grab the positions of each of the planets in stonyhurt coordinates.

obstime = Time('2014-05-15T07:54:00.005')
planet_list = ['earth', 'venus', 'mars', 'mercury', 'jupiter', 'neptune', 'uranus']
planet_coord = [get_body_heliographic_stonyhurst(this_planet, time=obstime) for this_planet in planet_list]

Now lets make a plot.

fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = plt.subplot(1, 1, 1, projection='polar')
for this_planet, this_coord in zip(planet_list, planet_coord):
    plt.plot(np.deg2rad(this_coord.lon), this_coord.radius, 'o', label=this_planet)
plt.legend(loc='lower left')
plt.show()