LibEphemeris project - NASA Grade Backend

[g-battaglia]

If you’ve been using Kerykeion for a while, you know that many calculations currently rely on Swiss Ephemeris. In parallel to Kerykeion, I’ve started working on LibEphemeris, a high‑precision astronomical ephemeris library for Python, intended as an open‑source alternative with an API that is largely compatible with Swiss Ephemeris.

LibEphemeris is written in pure Python, uses NASA JPL DE421 data through Skyfield, and is released under an LGPL license. It already covers the most common needs for astrological work and is extensively tested against Swiss Ephemeris for consistency. In the short term, the main objective is to reach a 1:1 match with the pyswisseph API so that any code currently calling pyswisseph can, in principle, swap to LibEphemeris as a drop‑in replacement.

At this stage LibEphemeris is in a very early pre‑alpha phase, is not yet used by Kerykeion in production, and the API is absolutely not stable. Breaking changes are expected and it should not be relied on for production workloads. For now LibEphemeris is completely separate from Kerykeion’s internal implementation; the idea is that, once it is mature and well tested, it can become a fully open, Python‑native ephemeris core for Kerykeion based on transparent scientific data.

If you want to experiment on your own, you can install LibEphemeris with:

pip install libephemeris

The repository is available at https://github.com/g-battaglia/libephemeris, where you can find more technical details and follow development. Feedback, specific use cases and ideas are very welcome at this stage, because they can still influence the direction of the project.