I follow privong's suggestion for stellarium for celestial body visualization. However, if you want precision data as an input to your code, I would make use o

I follow privong's suggestion for stellarium for celestial body visualization. However, if you want precision data as an input to your code, I would make use of NASA JPL's ephemerides system [0]. It is precise and reliable. Another, more pythonic option is pyephem [1], which allows you to "calculate positions of stars and planets" at any given time. Both options can be easily incorporated with astropy and APLpy, suggested by privong, for calculations and plotting. [0] http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyephem/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyephem/