ISSpy

Introduction

This project began when I wanted to illuminate my lifx bulb when the International Space Station is less than five minutes away. Open Notify was the only library I could find to provide this information. However it was not completely accurate - at least at my location (Melbourne, Australia)¹.

¹ https://github.com/open-notify/Open-Notify-API/issues/20

Installation

There is no backwards capability with python2. Please use python3 if you want to use this library.

pip install isspy

Usage

For the moment, this library uses Spot The Station by default. Country, Region and City are given in the url for Spot the Station. e.g https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=Australia&region=Victoria&city=Melbourne

from isspy import isspy

country = "Australia"
region = "Victoria"
city = "Melbourne"

passes = isspy.ISSpy(country, region, city)

#Returns list of passes as a dictionary
print(passes.get_passes())

#expected output
[{'datetime': datetime.datetime(2019, 4, 20, 19, 14), 
  'duration': 1, 
  'elevation': 17, 
  'approach_elev': 11, 
  'approach_dir': 'N', 
  'departure_elev': 17,
  'departure_dir': 'NNE'}] 

Future

Open-Notify also provides the current location of the ISS and the people aboard. I will incorporate this at a later date.