Sunrise and Sunset time in Python

Question

I'm currently working on a project that notifies the users when certain activities related to light are triggered. I've done the part related to light. Hence, I need to find an effective way to retrieve sunrise and sunset time in python, since the whole script is written in python. I know there are several libraries out there for other languages, I wonder what the most convenient way is to do this in python.

It will seem pretty much like this, I suppose:

if(sunrise<T<sunset) and (light<threshold):
    notifyUser()

I'd appreciate any help here, have a good one.

Answer 1

I have compared few packages (suntime, suntimes, sunriset, astral) and times sunrise and sunset times returned by them. All of them return local time but you can easily get UTC time as well. This is the result:

from datetime import date, datetime, timezone, timedelta
import pytz
import time
from suntime import Sun, SunTimeException
from suntimes import SunTimes
import sunriset
import astral, astral.sun

latitude = 52.0691667
longitude = 19.4805556
altitude = 0
tz_poland = pytz.timezone('Europe/Warsaw')
tz_name = 'Europe/Warsaw'
for_date = date(2021, 4, 6)
print('====== suntime ======')
abd = for_date
sun = Sun(latitude, longitude)
today_sr = sun.get_sunrise_time()
today_ss = sun.get_sunset_time()
print(today_sr.astimezone(tz_poland))
print(today_ss.astimezone(tz_poland))
print('====== suntimes ======')
sun2 = SunTimes(longitude=longitude, latitude=latitude, altitude=altitude)
day = datetime(for_date.year, for_date.month, for_date.day)
print(sun2.risewhere(day, tz_name))
print(sun2.setwhere(day, tz_name))
print('====== sunriset ======')
local = datetime.now()
utc = datetime.utcnow()
local_tz = float(((local - utc).days * 86400 + round((local - utc).seconds, -1))/3600)
number_of_years = 1
start_date = for_date
df = sunriset.to_pandas(start_date, latitude, longitude, 2, number_of_years)
for index, row in df.iterrows():
    print(row['Sunrise'])
    print(row['Sunset'])
    break
print('====== astral ======')
l = astral.LocationInfo('Custom Name', 'My Region', tz_name, latitude, longitude)
s = astral.sun.sun(l.observer, date=for_date)
print(s['sunrise'].astimezone(tz_poland))
print(s['sunset'].astimezone(tz_poland))

And the return:

====== suntime ======
2021-04-06 06:05:00+02:00
2021-04-06 19:16:00+02:00
====== suntimes ======
2021-04-06 06:04:34.000553+02:00
2021-04-06 19:17:16.000613+02:00
====== sunriset ======
0 days 06:02:52.093465
0 days 19:16:49.892350
====== astral ======
2021-04-06 06:03:39.792229+02:00
2021-04-06 19:17:01.188463+02:00

Please note only suntimes package support altitude.