The Astrocats package enables astronomers to construct their own curated catalogs of astronomical data with the intention of producing shareable catalogs of that data in human-readable formats. Astrocats is used by several existing open astronomy catalogs, including:
- The Open Supernova Catalog [GitHub repo]
- The Open TDE Catalog [GitHub repo]
- The Open Nova Catalog [GitHub repo]
- The Open Black Hole Catalog [GitHub repo]
The process for creating one's own open astronomy catalog involves checking out this package and designing a "module" for it that is specific to that catalog's needs, a Wiki is available with instructions for doing so. At the moment the most developed module is the Open Supernova Catalog module; to set up astrocats with the supernovae module, one needs to check out two repositories:
git clone git@github.com:astrocatalogs/astrocats.git
cd astrocats
git clone git@github.com:astrocatalogs/supernovae.git
Astrocats will soon be listed on PyPi, at which point the install instructions will involve pip and a setup script, for now the install must be performed manually.