Pysolar / News: Recent posts

Pysolar is a collection of Python libraries for simulating the irradiation of any point on earth by the sun. It includes code for extremely precise ephemeris calculations.

The code on Sourceforge is obsolete; the project is now hosted on Github.

The new code can be found here: http://github.com/pingswept/pysolar/tree/master

Release 0.2.0 has the completed implementation of the solar position algorithm described by Reda and Andreas (NREL 2005). I've also added a unit testing framework and updated the license to the GNU General Public License, version 3, from version 2.

At this point, Pysolar has basic functionality, but it is relatively untested. I did validate it against the data in the 2005 paper by Reda and Andreas; it agrees to 4 significant figures, but that's just one data point.... read more

A few weeks ago, I wrote some Python code to calculate the position of the sun based on latitude, longitude, and a timestamp that includes year, month, day, and time. While I do work as an engineering consultant in the solar industry, this is a project that I started on the side out of my own personal interest. Now that it at least sort of works, I'm releasing it on Sourceforge in the hopes that other people will be able to use it as a base for work in the solar industry.... read more