If you've been paying attention to my Twitter account, you've probably seen a reference or two about how I've been calculating the positions of astronomical bodies. Well, today I release part of that to you.

Download: Source

The above code is pretty much a direct port of Keith Burnett's implementation here. Outside of porting, my only changes were some code clean up and having the timezone be calculated automatically for the longitude given. This means that you will always get back a time stamp that is local to the point of origin.

How to Use Moon::calculateMoonTimes(month, day, year, latitude, longitude);

date_default_timezone_set('America/Chicago');
include('moon.php');
print_r(Moon::calculateMoonTimes(6, 28, 2011, 36.754478, -96.110291));

The above code will output the following result:

stdClass Object ( [moonrise] => 1309246800 [moonset] => 1309300560 )

Moonrise and moonset, as stated previously, are a Unix time stamp local to the latitude and longitude given.