Planet Positions

Here is a menu driven command line C++ program for finding the approximate positions of the sun, moon, planets (including Pluto) asteroids and comets with elliptical orbits.  It is intended to be accurate for backyard hobby use.  The gzipped tarball has the source code along with the required data files.  Here is the link.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vjau00D_6HmflwKk-JDt9Qpq1FZDzlNP/view?usp=sharing

The included files are...

p_elem_t1.txt  This holds the orbital information for the 8 planets and Pluto.

ELEMENTS.NUMBER holds the orbital information for Asteroids and came from NASA’s JPL website.  This is an abbreviated list of the first 598 numbered asteroids.  The full list is available at the link below.  

ELEMENTS.COMET holds the information for comets and is also available at NASA’s JPL website.  

BrightStars.txt, naturally holds the location of bright stars down to about magnitude 2.5.  As of this writing, it can be found at http://maps.seds.org/Stars_en/

The websits and resources below were very helpful.

Keith Burnett 

http://www.stargazing.net/kepler/

By Paul Schlyter, Stockholm, Sweden

http://stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html

E.M. Standish and J.G Williams

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/approx_pos.html

JPL Small Body Elemenets Tables (source of asteroid and comet data)

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sb/elem_tables.html