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Optimal Viewing
Many things effect the optimal viewing of a body in the night sky: its position, the moon, the sun, and the amount of air mass between you and it. This lesson shows you how to calculate all these concepts and create a graph in Matplotlib to display the information.
Although not used in this course, three time utility libraries are mentioned. If you want to check them out for yourself, they are:
00:00 In the previous lesson I showed you how to find conjunctions or something close enough. In this lesson, I’ll be talking about the viewing conditions for any given body in the night sky.
00:11 If you’re into astronomy, the most likely activity you’d be doing is staring at the night sky. There are lots of things to consider. If you actually want to stare at something specific, though.
00:21 First off, unless you’re in the northern hemisphere and your target is Polaris, well your target moves second in doing that pesky moving thing, one of the places it can move is below the horizon.
00:33 And if all that isn’t complicated enough, if it is a full moon, the brightness can get in the way of your viewing.
00:40 Oh, and did I mention that the moon isn’t the only bright thing in the sky? Don’t stare directly at the sun. It tends to anger. Apollo, he’s a little shy.
00:50 Recall from the previous lesson that one of the coordinate systems that astronomers use is the angles, right? Ascension and declination. These are relative to the equator, and unless you happen to be standing on the equator at the exact right spot, these coordinates need to be translated into something local to you.
01:09 Enter the altitude azimuth coordinate system, also known as the horizontal coordinate system, like with right ascension and declination. These are angular values, but instead they’re relative to wherever you are.
01:24 The altitude is the angle of an object’s elevation in the sky while the azimuth is the angle between the object and north.
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