# Given a timestamp, getting current position on Earth in a heliocentric coordinate system

**URL:** <https://community.openastronomy.org/t/given-a-timestamp-getting-current-position-on-earth-in-a-heliocentric-coordinate-system/213>\
**Category:** Astropy\
**Tags:** astropy, question\
**Created:** [November 6, 2021, 3:36pm UTC](https://community.openastronomy.org/t/given-a-timestamp-getting-current-position-on-earth-in-a-heliocentric-coordinate-system/213 "2021-11-06T15:36:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dav](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex005/user_avatar/community.openastronomy.org/dav/32/143_2.png) [@dav](https://community.openastronomy.org/u/dav)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2021, 3:36pm UTC](https://community.openastronomy.org/t/given-a-timestamp-getting-current-position-on-earth-in-a-heliocentric-coordinate-system/213/1 "2021-11-06T15:36:35Z")

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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](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/helios/plan_des.html), 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](https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/coordinates/solarsystem.html) 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!