PyEphem
Version 3.7
22 August 2005

PyEphem provides an `ephem' Python module that can perform many
astronomical computations.  You can find the most recent version at

   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/projects/pyephem.html

The computation routines behind PyEphem were extracted from the XEphem
program of Elwood Charles Downey (ecdowney@ClearSkyInstitute.com),
available from http://iraf.noao.edu/~ecdowney/xephem.html.

See the COPYING file in this directory for copyright information.

INSTALLING

Building and installing this module requires Python, your C compiler,
and the standard Python distutils.  You can run the setup.py script in
this directory to build or install the package.  Typically, entering

	python setup.py install

(which you will probably need to do as root, unless you have Python
installed in your home directory) will both build and install the
module, which you can use in your Python programs with either an

	import ephem

or perhaps a

	from ephem import *

to avoid putting "ephem." in front of all the names.  There are small
scripts in the examples/ directory, and test suites for verifying your
installation in the test/ directory.

DOCUMENTATION

See the doc/pyephem-manual.html file in this archive or look online at
http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/projects/pyephem-manual.html for a guide
to programming with PyEphem.

CONTRIBUTING

If you write useful scripts with PyEphem, please consider submitting
them to be considered for the 'examples/' directory.  In particular,
there will probably be interest in algorithms that search for various
celestial circumstances, like eclipses or conjunctions; not needing
such routines myself, however, I have not endeavored to produce any.

AUTHOR

Brandon Craig Rhodes
brandon@rhodesmill.org
http://rhodesmill.org/brandon
