Astroquery¶

This is the documentation for the Astroquery affiliated package of astropy.

Code and issue tracker are on GitHub.

Introduction¶

Astroquery is a set of tools for querying astronomical web forms and databases.

The Astroquery API Specification is intended to be kept as consistent as possible, such that any web service can be used with a minimal learning curve imposed on the user.

There are two other packages with complimentary functionality as Astroquery: astropy.vo is in the Astropy core and pyvo is an Astropy affiliated package. They are more oriented to general virtual observatory discovery and queries, whereas Astroquery has web service specific interfaces.

Installation¶

Astroquery must be installed from source:

$ git clone git@github.com:astropy/astroquery.git
$ cd astroquery
$ python setup.py install

pip install also works:

$ pip install git+http://github.com/astropy/astroquery.git#egg=astroquery

Requirements¶

The following packages are required for astroquery installation & use:

numpy

astropy (v>=0.3)

requests

Using astroquery¶

All astroquery modules are supposed to follow the same API. In its simplest form, the API involves queries based on coordinates or object names. Some simple examples, using SIMBAD:

>>> from astroquery.simbad import Simbad
>>> result_table = Simbad.query_object("m1")
>>> result_table.pprint(show_unit=True)
MAIN_ID      RA         DEC     RA_PREC ... COO_QUAL COO_WAVELENGTH     COO_BIBCODE
          "h:m:s"     "d:m:s"           ...
------- ----------- ----------- ------- ... -------- -------------- -------------------
  M   1 05 34 31.94 +22 00 52.2       6 ...        C              R 2011A&A...533A..10L

All query tools allow coordinate-based queries:

>>> import astropy.coordinates as coord
>>> import astropy.units as u
>>> # works only for ICRS coordinates:
>>> c = coord.ICRSCoordinates("05h35m17.3s -05h23m28s")
>>> r = 5 * u.arcminute
>>> result_table = Simbad.query_region(c, radius=r)
>>> result_table.pprint(show_unit=True)
   MAIN_ID           RA           DEC      ... COO_QUAL COO_WAVELENGTH     COO_BIBCODE
                  "h:m:s"       "d:m:s"    ...
-------------- ------------- ------------- ... -------- -------------- -------------------
     HD  38875 05 34 59.7297 -80 51 09.082 ...        A              O 2007A&A...474..653V
TYC 9390-799-1 05 33 58.2222 -80 50 18.575 ...        B                1998A&A...335L..65H

Table of Contents¶

The modules and their maintainers are listed on the Maintainers wiki page.

The following modules have been completed using a common API:

These others are functional, but do not follow a common & consistent API:

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