I’m an experienced developer but a complete novice at astronomy.
My ultimate goal is to take my current lat/lng and timestamp, and determine where I am in a fixed grid/lattice overlaid on the solar system.
My understanding is that there are several Sun-centered coordinate systems to choose from, and what I want is perhaps the Solar Ecliptic coordinate system, but really I don’t care as long as it is a fixed coordinate system that the Earth is moving through.
From what I’ve gleaned so far, I can use astropy (and the solar_system_ephemeris functions in particular) to take a lat/long and timestamp and determine the location of some other body in the solar system in an Earth-centric solar system.
That seems like somewhere under the covers it probably at some point in calculation process generated exactly the information I’m looking for, and then just kept going. I was getting ready to just dig into the source and figure out how I can stop where I want to, but then it occurred to me that from the astropy docs on Solar System Ephmerides that all of this might just be wrapping a huge data set of pre-calculated data that simply does not contain what I’m looking for, or that what I’m looking for cannot be easily derived from it, and I might need to go deeper into what created that data.
This is the point where I realized I’m in over my head and came here 
any advice appreciated!