Planetary information is generated by the program planet, which calculates locations a given Julian date, or for the current time (given no arguments). In common use, an alternate syntax is provided to simplify the calculation of the Julian date, in which integers for month, day, (mandatory), and year are given. Time is specified in the form hh.mm or hh on a 24-hour clock and defaults to 0.00 (midnight). The -z flag (same format as -t) gives the number of hours the observer is west of GMT (see below).
A summary is then printed on the standard output giving the right ascension, declination and distance (in AU's) for the Sun and all planets except Pluto. This data is additionally placed in the file planet.star for subsequent use by charting software.
The program moonphase gives the current lunar phase. At present it does not provide coordinate data for subsequent plotting.
The program epoch converts right-ascension and declination data within yale.star style datasets from epoch 1975.0 into the epoch 2000.0. Either the first or both epoch dates may be overridden with command line parameters (floating point values). The data is read and written from the standard input and output. Because only the coordinate data is updated within each line item, the program may be used on either versions of the reduced Yale data.