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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 3.7 or later. As an astropy affiliate, astroquery requires astropy version 4.2.1 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 pip installed (note the --pre for picking up released developer versions, and -U for upgrade):

$ python -m pip install -U --pre astroquery

To install all the mandatory and optional dependencies add the [all] identifier to the pip command above (or use [docs] or [test] for the dependencies required to build the documentation or run the tests):

$ python -m pip install -U --pre astroquery[all]

To install the 'bleeding edge' version:

$ python -m pip install git+https://github.com/astropy/astroquery.git

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 -m pip install .

Using astroquery

Importing astroquery on its own doesn't get you much: you need to import each sub-module specifically. See the documentation for a list of Available Services. 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.

Citing Astroquery

If you use astroquery, please cite the paper we published in The Astronomical Journal.

The BibTeX entry is available from the package itself:

import astroquery
astroquery.__citation__

In addition you may also want to refer to specific versions of the package. We create a separate Zenodo DOI for each version, they can be looked up at the following Zenodo page

Additional Links

Download Development ZIP | Download Development TAR

Maintained by Adam Ginsburg and Brigitta Sipocz ([email protected])