Your question is valid and is a common operation. When computing when an object will be visible, many observers want to be able to draw a globe or map that is marked with the position from which an object like Pluto is directly overhead. Such a position on the globe at a given instant (and you do say “at the current time”) is, all other things being equal, the best-situated place from which to observe the object.
Unfortunately, the “libastro” C library that PyEphem wraps seems to only provide one instance of this concept: Earth satellites have .sublat
and .sublong
attributes, because it is so common to want to draw the path of a satellite on a globe or map.
But libastro does not generalize the concept. From what I can see, there is no way to generate the point on the Earth that is directly below any other Solar System object. And since I have not been in the habit of trying to extend libastro, it is likely that PyEphem will not gain this ability.
However, I have been developing a replacement for PyEphem that is written in pure Python and that I will be free to extend, called Skyfield. I will hopefully have this concept working there soon, and when I do so I plan to make it work for all objects, and not limit it to Earth satellites!
(In the meantime, as pointed out in the comments: you could try asking PyEphem for the geocentric RA and dec and, if you could adjust RA by the Earth's current hour angle, then you could turn those into an approximate latitude and longitude.)
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