Sunrise and other astronomical data from the command line

command linesoftware-rec

Is there a simple open-source, command-line program that can show the sunrise and sunset times at a given date and location, and perhaps moon and planet data as well?

Browsing the Debian package database and Google searches, I can't find anything relevant. This surprises me — considering the number of people who are both astronomy geeks and unix geeks, I'd have expected a de-facto-standard sunrise(1) (or perhaps sunrise(6)).

I am not interested in more complex programs that incidentally perform the calculations, such as sky maps (celestia, kstars, starplot, stellarium), earth maps (sunclock,
xplanet), calendars/agendas (emacs, remind), clocks (glunarclock,
wmsun), tide almanachs (xtide). There is perhaps aa (astronomical-almanac), but I don't see a simple way of asking it what time the sun will rise on this date at these longitude and latitude.

What did I miss?

Best Answer

For lazy bones as I am there is a very simple program called hdate, available in many distributions (apt-get install hdate on Debian/Ubuntu/…):

hdate -s -l N50 -L E14 -z2

Output:

Wednesday, 26 June 2019, 23 Sivan 5779
sunrise: 04:55
sunset: 21:17

Options:

  • -s sunset sunrise
  • -l, -L: Altitude and Latitude of Prague (50°05′N 14°25′E)
  • -z zone: SELC=+2

תודה רבה יהודים חכמים. :-)

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