[Pythoneers] astroquery

[Leonard Burtscher]

Hi pythoneers,

In case you need to query an astronomical database for a number of targets, e.g. get coordinates for a list of objects, this may be handy:

crs=open("Desktop/sources.txt","r")

for source in crs:
    obj=Ned.query_object(source)
    print("insert into sources values(\"{source}\",\"{name}\",\"{ra}\",\"{dec}\",\"{z}\");".format(source=source.strip(),name=obj[0]['Object Name'].decode(),ra=obj[0]['RA(deg)'],dec=obj[0]['DEC(deg)'],z=obj[0]['Redshift']))

The return then looks like:
insert into sources values("ESO137-G034","ESO 137- G 034","248.80879","-58.08003","0.009144");
insert into sources values("ESO093-G003","ESO 093- G 003","164.85846","-66.33281","0.006106");
insert into sources values("ESO208-G021","ESO 208- G 021","113.48438","-50.44303","0.003619");
insert into sources values("IC4653","IC 4653","261.77991","-60.87958","0.006404");
...

In this case, I formatted the answer as an SQL insert statement.

You need to install astroquery (pip install astroquery) for that to work.

Ciao,
Leonard