PyVO¶
Introduction¶
This is the documentation for PyVO, an affiliated package for the astropy package.
PyVO lets you find and retrieve astronomical data available from archives that support standard IVOA virtual observatory service protocols.
Table Access Protocol (TAP) – accessing source catalogs using sql-ish queries.
Simple Image Access (SIA) – finding images in an archive.
Simple Spectral Access (SSA) – finding spectra in an archive.
Simple Cone Search (SCS) – for positional searching a source catalog or an observation log.
Simple Line Access (SLAP) – finding data about spectral lines, including their rest frequencies.
Note
If you need to access data which is not available via the Virtual Observatory standards, try the astropy affiliated package astroquery (and, of course, ask the data providers to do the right thing and use the proper standards for their publication).
Installation¶
PyVO is installable via pip.
pip install pyvo
Source Installation¶
git clone http://github.com/astropy/pyvo
cd pyvo
python setup.py install
Requirements¶
numpy
astropy
requests
Getting started¶
Data Access¶
Most of the interesting functionality of pyVO is through the various data access service interfaces (SCS for catalogs, SIA for images, SSAP for spectra, TAP for tables). All of these behave in a similar way.
First, there is a class describing a specific type of service:
>>> import pyvo as vo
>>> service = vo.dal.TAPService("http://dc.g-vo.org/tap")
Once you have a service object, you can run queries with parameters specific to the service type. In this example, a database query is enough:
>>> resultset = service.search("SELECT TOP 1 * FROM ivoa.obscore")
>>> resultset
<DALResultsTable length=1>
dataproduct_type dataproduct_subtype ... source_table
...
object object ... object
---------------- ------------------- ... ------------
image ... ppakm31.maps
What is returned by the search method is a to get a resultset object, which essentially works like a numpy record array. It can be processed either by columns:
>>> row = resultset[0]
>>> column = resultset["dataproduct_type"]
or by rows.
>>> for row in resultset:
... calib_level = row["calib_level"]
For more details on how to use data access services see Data Access (pyvo.dal)
Registry search¶
PyVO also contains a component that lets your programs interrogate the IVOA Registry in a simple way. For instance, to iterate over all TAP services supporting the obscore data model (which lets people publish observational datasets through TAP tables), you can write:
>>> for service in vo.regsearch(datamodel="obscore"):
... print(service['ivoid'])
ivo://aip.gavo.org/tap
ivo://archive.stsci.edu/caomtap
ivo://astro.ucl.ac.uk/tap
ivo://astron.nl/tap
ivo://asu.cas.cz/tap
...
ivo://xcatdb/3xmmdr7/tap
ivo://xcatdb/4xmm/tap