Astro3Words: easy coordinates in astronomy

Hi! Welcome to the documentation of Astro3Words – a Python package to find what3words coordinates of astronomical sources.

If you’ve ever been confused by endless J01234.567+012345 object names in talks and posters, or bored of jokes about their beautiful names, you are not alone. Coordinates don’t have to be so difficult!

Astro3Words converts an R.A, Dec coordinate into three words - with a precision of 0.1”. It’s easy! Our goal is to help astronomy outreach and make astronomy more accessible. We encourage the rest of the community to use our package and get involved. If you find a bug, or have a suggestion, please create an issue on GitHub.

User Guide:

Quick start guide

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Installation

Install astro3words with pip:

pip install astro3words

You are ready to go!

Finding an object’s address

Given ra and dec of your source in degrees, you can get its 3-word coordinate simple with

import astro3words
astro3words.coords_to_words(ra=148.968458, dec=+69.679703)

'gargled.crisps.loosening'

Converting an address to coordinates

If you see an interesting object at a talk and want to check it out, you can convert the astro3words back into the object’s coordinates:

astro3words.words_to_coords('gargled.crisps.loosening')

(148.968478, 69.679698)

API Guide

Contributing:

This project is still very much under development, and we are happy with new ideas and contributions! If you would like to get involved, please reach out to Liza Sazonova (esazono1@jhu.edu).