sun

sun#

Solar position (elevation and azimuth) for a location and time.

See sun for usage examples.

API Reference#

Solar geometry helpers (sun elevation and azimuth) based on PyEphem.

pyedautils.data_prep.sun.sun_position(timestamp, latitude: float, longitude: float, *, altitude: float = 0.0, refraction: bool = True) → Tuple[float, float] | DataFrame[source]#

Solar elevation and azimuth for the given time(s) and location.

Parameters:

  • timestamp – A single datetime/pandas.Timestamp or a collection of timestamps (pandas.Series, DatetimeIndex, list or array). Timezone-aware values are converted to UTC; naive values are assumed to be UTC.

  • latitude – Observer latitude in decimal degrees (north positive).

  • longitude – Observer longitude in decimal degrees (east positive).

  • altitude – Observer height above sea level in meters. Default 0.

  • refraction – If True (default), return the apparent position including atmospheric refraction. If False, return the true geometric position (no refraction).

Returns:

a (elevation, azimuth) tuple in degrees. For a collection: a pandas.DataFrame with columns elevation and azimuth (degrees), indexed like the input (a Series keeps its index, otherwise a UTC-naive DatetimeIndex is used).

Elevation is the angle above the horizon (negative when the sun is below the horizon). Azimuth is measured clockwise from geographic north (0=N, 90=E, 180=S, 270=W).

Return type:

For scalar input