Sunrise and other astronomical data from the command line

Question

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?

Answer 1

Did you try sunwait?

http://www.risacher.org/sunwait/

Sunwait is a small C program for calculating sunrise and sunset, as well as civil, nautical, and astronomical twilights. [..]

Answer 2

Check out this Linux Home Automation site and search the page for "sunrise". There are some command line programs there from c. 1985 that are pretty minimalist. I have the source code for a number of related programs from that era, but I can't find them on the web.

Update: I just found the source for a few others, including sdate, on this Event Logger page. Search the page for "rise_set".

Answer 3

I ended up using Perl's DateTime::Event::Sunrise, because it tends to be easier for me to deploy a module from CPAN than to compile C programs.

Sample usage:

use DateTime;
use DateTime::Astro::Sunrise;
$latitude = "+48.857"; $longitude = "+2.351"; 
$sr = DateTime::Astro::Sunrise->new($longitude, $latitude, 0, 3);
$date = DateTime->now; $date->set_time_zone("local");
($rise, $set) = $sr->sunrise($date);
$rise->set_time_zone("local"); $set->set_time_zone("local");
print $rise, " to ", $set, "\n";

My sunrise script.