Accessing Online Astronomical Data
Astroquery is an astropy affiliated package that contains a collection of tools to access online Astronomical data. Each web service has its own sub-package. For example, to interface with the SIMBAD website, use the simbad sub-package:
>>> from astroquery.simbad import Simbad
>>> theta1c = Simbad.query_object('tet01 Ori C')
>>> theta1c.pprint()
MAIN_ID RA DEC ... COO_QUAL COO_WAVELENGTH COO_BIBCODE
------------- ------------- ------------- ... -------- -------------- -------------------
* tet01 Ori C 05 35 16.4637 -05 23 22.848 ... A O 2007A&A...474..653V
Installation and Requirements
Astroquery works with Python 3.6 or later. As an astropy affiliate, astroquery requires astropy version 3.1.2 or later.
astroquery uses the requests module to communicate with the internet. BeautifulSoup and html5lib' are needed for HTML parsing for some services. The keyring module is also required for accessing services that require a login. These can all be installed using pip or anaconda. Running the tests requires curl to be installed.
The latest version of astroquery can be conda installed:
$ conda install -c conda-forge astroquery
or pip installed:
$ pip install --pre astroquery
and the 'bleeding edge' main version:
$ pip install https://github.com/astropy/astroquery/archive/main.zip
or cloned and installed from source:
$ # If you have a github account:
$ git clone [email protected]:astropy/astroquery.git
$ # If you do not:
$ git clone https://github.com/astropy/astroquery.git
$ cd astroquery
$ python setup.py install
Using astroquery
Importing astroquery on its own doesn't get you much: you need to import each sub-module specifically. Check out the docs to find a list of the tools available. The API shows the standard suite of tools common to most modules, e.g. query_object and query_region.
To report bugs and request features, please use the issue tracker. Code contributions are very welcome, though we encourage you to follow the API and contributing guidelines as much as possible.
