Extract text from SE1 files
To convert your SE1 file to another format, you need Swiss Ephemeris or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Astronomical Data File" file type, you need software like Swiss Ephemeris or a similar tool.
The .se1 extension represents a specific binary data format primarily associated with the Swiss Ephemeris, a high-precision astronomical calculation library developed by Astrodienst AG. These files (e.g., sepl_18.se1) contain compressed planetary and asteroid position data derived from NASA's JPL DE406/DE431 ephemerides. They are critical for astrology software and scientific applications requiring millisecond-precision celestial mechanics. A major issue for users is that .se1 files are proprietary binary blobs, not human-readable text. You cannot simply open them in Notepad or Excel; doing so reveals garbled characters. To "convert" them, you typically use the swetest command-line utility to dump the calculations into a TXT or CSV format.
Alternatively, in the gaming world, .se1 files serve as game save archives for the strategy game Shadow Empire. In this context, the file is often just a renamed ZIP archive containing the game state in XML or binary formats. Users looking to mod their save files or fix corruption can often change the extension from .se1 to zip to access the internal file structure using tools like 7-Zip or WinRAR.
Convert.Guru analyzes your SE1 file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted PDF, MPH, SAM and CXL files.
If you want to convert SE1 file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Swiss Ephemeris or similar software from the "Ephemeris Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to SE1, try Swiss Ephemeris or another comparable tool in the "Ephemeris Data Storage" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our SE1 converter.