Receiving live astronomical coordinates on Arduino Mega using telnet and ESP8266 wifi module

Question

I'd like to receive on my arduino live coordinates of planets of solar system. Because there are already websites listing every planet coordinates, I thought it would be easier to just use a wifi module (in my case an ESP8266) and connect the arduino to one of these website.

I have the option of getting it from this website, but I have no idea how to do that.

The other way of doing it may be to connect to Horizon via their telnet server at this adress :telnet://horizons.jpl.nasa.gov:6775

Though I know how establish a connection with this server on my computer using Putty, I have no idea how to connect my arduino to it, execute commands, and, more importantly, get data (RA and DEC) of every solar system main objects.

This is my first time using Arduino wifi module, so I have no experience with it, and I don't know what it is capable of.

Thanks a lot for your attention,

Thomas

Answer 1

That telnet interface is an interactive service. Getting an Arduino to interact with it is not an easy task - certainly not a task for a beginner with no experience of network programming.

A much easier task is to scrape the website since that just returns text which you then need to search through a bit at a time looking for the information you need.