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Sunrise and other astronomical data from the command line

31 votes
9 answers
17011 views
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](http://www.moshier.net/)) , 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?
Asked by Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' (862327 rep)
Oct 9, 2010, 01:55 PM
Last activity: Jun 13, 2025, 09:13 PM