HARP - Horizon-Aware Recommender and Planner for deep-sky astrophotography sessions
A CLI planner for deep-sky astrophotography sessions. Given a date, a site, your telescope + camera, the real horizon of your spot and the Moon, HARP ranks the targets you can actually image tonight — usable windows, Moon impact, and mosaic framing tailored to your rig.
Full documentation — installation, usage, horizon measuring, configuration
The typical flow: measure the horizon once → generate the .hrz → load it in N.I.N.A. and in HARP → plan the night → export the ranked targets (or the mosaic panels) straight into N.I.N.A.'s sequencer. See examples/ for a working config, horizon file, and sample outputs.
A harp is the celestial Lyre — the constellation Lyra, home of Vega and the Ring Nebula. And the acronym leads with the input most planners ignore: your horizon.
The distribution is harp-astro (the bare PyPI name is squatted by an empty project; a PEP 541 request is pending) — the installed package and the CLI command are plain harp.
Sites (position + .hrz + timezone) and optical setups (focal + sensor) live in sites.yaml, searched in the current directory and ~/.config/harp/. Precedence: CLI option > config value > built-in default. Details in the usage guide.
An Android frontend lives in android/: the same Python core, embedded on-device via Chaquopy, plus a horizon wizard that measures your skyline with the phone's sensors — true-north azimuths computed on-device (built-in World Magnetic Model, no manual declination), tap-to-record vertices, .hrz export.
Two ways to get an APK: CI (every push builds the harp-debug-apk artifact in the Android workflow — zero local setup) or a local build for the fast bugfix loop (gradle -p android :app:assembleDebug, headless toolchain, no Android Studio). Setup commands, phone transfer (HTTP or wireless adb), and the device test checklist: android/README.md.
Scripting/frontend note: harp plan --json, harp info --json, and harp mosaic --json emit machine-readable output over the stable harp.api surface.
Releases: ./release.sh --major|--minor|--patch|X.Y.Z (trunk model on main; tag push triggers CI → PyPI).
HPC/CFD researcher by day, balcony astrophotographer by night. Owns a Newton 200/800 f/4 and a balcony whose entire southern hemisphere is a wall. Measured the horizon with a phone compass while fending off a magnetized railing, then wrote a planner rather than accept that M8 belongs to the neighbours.
Large language model, second author, zero telescopes. Has never seen the night sky — or anything else — yet computed where the Moon would be at 03:46 and was right. Refactored the whole toolkit between dusk and dawn, no coffee involved; accepts payment in tokens and byte-identical CSVs.
Multi-licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, and MIT — choose the one that fits your use. See licensing/.
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