Command-Line Interface

The Python package also installs a command called apexpy which allows using the convert() method from the command line. The command-line interface allows you to make use of the Python library even if you don’t know or use Python. See the reference for Command-line interface for a list of arguments to the commands. Below are some simple usage examples.

Running Many Locations

You can convert many locations at a single time using an input file. To follow this example, create a file called input.txt with the input latitudes and longitudes on each row separated by whitespace as shown below.

# gdlat gdlon
# comment lines like these are ignored
60 15
61 15
62 15

To convert these geodetic coordinates to apex coordinates using the magnetic field model for the date 2015-01-01 using a height of 300 km, run the command apexpy geo apex 20150101 --height 300 -i input.txt -o output.txt (in this specific example you could also just use 2015 or 201501 for the date). This will create an output file named output.txt that looks like this:

46954727 93.63981628
52270126 94.04476166
57146454 94.47725677

Running One Location

If you don’t have a lot of data to process, you can skip the input and output files using command-line piping. The echo command will provide the input geodetic latitude and longitude in this example and the output appears on the screen:

$ echo 60 15 | apexpy geo apex 2015 --height 300
57.46954727 93.63981628

MLT Conversions

The previous examples all showed how to convert from geodetic to apex coordinates, but you can convert to and from any of the coordinate systems supported by convert(). In this example, we show how to convert from geodetic latitude and longitude to apex latitude and magnetic local time (MLT).

MLT conversion works in much the same way as any other coordinate conversion, but requires both date and time (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS). For example, if you want to find the MLT (and the apex latitude) at geodetic coordinates (60, 15) for midnight on the day 2015-01-01, run echo 60 15 | apexpy geo mlt 20150101000000. The output will look like this:

56.59033585 1.03556417