About NASA/JPL Horizons API Demos

NeoProgrammics / PHP Science Labs

About NASA/JPL Horizons API Demos
by Jay Tanner of Geneva, NY, USA - 2026

Jay.Tanner@NeoProgrammics.com

This site teaches interested students of astronomy how to connect to and make use of some of NASA/JPL's extremely powerful computational resources using the freely available PHP web programming language.

It connects directly to the official NASA/JPL Horizons API to perform the computations.

Jay Tanner at BlueSky

Jay Tanner at FaceBook

About This Web Site

NeoProgrammics.com was born on AD 2000-Nov-01-Wed. As of today, the web site is now 9411 days old = 1344 weeks and 3 days = 25.76591 years.

There are no ads, commercial promotions, financial solicitations or pseudoscientific nonsense of any kind - only pure science and math software tools and related data, many provided with free public domain PHP source code and graphics.

FREE and publicly available tools used in constructing this web site include:

XAMPP
The Apache web server and PHP version I use to write and test the programs locally prior to releasing them on this public web site. I am currently using PHP v8.2.12, but some scripts were written in earlier PHP versions, since the site started in back in November of 2000. It started with PHP v4.

MathJax
This is a free JavaScript library used to create mathematical expressions or equations within a web page. I use it to create graphic screen-caps of equations so that if JavaScript is not or cannot be used, others can still view the equations without it.

NotePad 3
This main text editing program I use to write the PHP programs. However just about any plain text editor can be used to write PHP scripts.

POV-Ray v3.7.0
This is an open-source 3D ray-tracing package I used to render photorealistic lunar scenes. This is a must-have program for someone into photo-realistic, 3D graphics rendering.

LUNEX v2
The POV-Ray package mentioned above runs this LUNEX v2 script I wrote to render all of the photorealistic images of the moon found on this site.

The site features several public domain demo PHP programs, with source code, that are designed to use publicly available NASA/JPL resources to perform customized astronomical computations on demand. The PHP software is built around the NASA/JPL Horizons API in Pasadena, California, USA.
The same NASA/JPL Horizons API that powers these programs also powers the on-line public Horizons interface at: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html
There are also some lunar quarter phases computations based on the earlier DE405 ephemeris model spanning the years from 1600 to 2200. This model is not yet obsolete and still has some useful applications.
The demo programs show users how they can create their own customized software to access the JPL API functions directly. Since NASA/JPL computers are performing all the computations, you get the same official NASA values directly from the source.
Most of the API-based astronomy software comes with complete, ready-to-run PHP (v8.2.12) public domain source code so that students of the API can study it, modify it in any way they wish and use it as a guide for creating their own customized Internet astronomy software. It is very easy to do with PHP.
The software should be able to be run on any personal or public web site with PHP enabled. By installing a local web server with PHP enabled and with an Internet connection available to connect to the API, the software can also be run directly from the desktop via any standard web browser. This allows for precise customization and personal from-home useage.
Since the programs are mostly educational demos, to keep the code easy to follow, there may be a few minor bugs but nothing too critical. The main purpose of the programs is to demonstrate how to make calls to the API via custom PHP programming and processing the returned data.