🌅 USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper

🚀 Pull sun and moon almanac data in seconds. Get rise, set, and transit times, twilight, moon phase, and illumination from the US Naval Observatory for any date and place on Earth.

Turn the US Naval Observatory (USNO) almanac into clean, structured records you can drop into a photography planner, a sailing log, a field-research dataset, or an astronomy app. Give it one or more latitude,longitude points and a date or date range, and it returns the sun and moon events for each day at each place.

Coverage is global. The USNO rise/set/transit service computes events for any coordinate between latitude -90 and 90 and longitude -180 and 180, including polar day and polar night notes when the sun or moon never rises or sets. Times can be returned in UTC or shifted to any time-zone offset, with an optional daylight saving flag.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Photographers and videographers	Plan golden hour, blue hour, and moonlit shoots
Sailors, pilots, and surveyors	Look up twilight and solar noon for navigation
Field researchers and ecologists	Tie observations to sun and moon timing
Astronomy app and bot developers	Seed a rise/set engine without writing one

📋 What the USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper does

This Actor calls the public USNO rise/set/transit/twilight API and returns one clean record per location per date:

• Sun events — rise, set, upper transit (solar noon), and the begin/end of civil twilight.
• Moon events — rise, set, and upper transit.
• Moon phase — current phase name, fraction illuminated, and the nearest principal phase with its date and time.
• Context — the day of week, the time-zone offset used, and a daylight saving flag.

Polar conditions (continuous day or night) are passed through as a sunNote or moonNote instead of a time. Every record carries a scrapedAt timestamp.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: currentMoonPhase, date, fractionIlluminated, latitude, longitude, moonRise, moonSet, results, scrapedAt, sunRise, sunSet. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper.
3. Enter one or more locations as latitude,longitude.
4. Set a startDate (and optional endDate), tz, and maxItems.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper
• NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP Ocean Data Scraper
• More science and reference data Actors in the ParseForge collection

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with the US Naval Observatory or the US Navy. Only publicly available data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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