de423 is the most recent short-period ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It achieves especially high accuracy for Mercury and Venus since it was prepared for the MESSENGER mission, and should be able to predict the coordinates of those planets within a few milliarcseconds.
Name: DE423 (February 2010)
Years: 1800 through 2200
Planets: Yes
Sun/Moon: Yes
Nutations: Yes
Librations: Yes
Report: Folkner (2010) [PDF]
Size: 36 MB
While lunar missions will want to use the slightly older ephemeris DE421 because of the extra accuracy that it provides for the Moon, general purpose users will probably find this ephemeris more useful, especially as it covers a full 400 years instead of only 150 years.
Similar accuracy can be expected from the long-term ephemeris DE422 which also covers a period of 6000 years, making it useful to astronomy historians. But as it requires a half-gigabyte of disk space, some users may prefer DE423.
To compute using this ephemeris in Python, see the jplephem package.
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Requirements:
· Python
· jplephem
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