Package to browse and explore the ESO archive. This should be the equivalent of searching from the official raw ESO archive but the results should be presented in a more comprehensible way.
Indeed, instead of having endless pages with one fits file per line, this package groups several fits files together, depending on the program ID and when the observations were taken. Therefore, at a quick glance, you can see how many times your favorite star has been observed with different instruments.
There is the possibility to query for the raw data or the phase 3 data.
Starting a query is fairly simple, you can only query for a star name (for instance, queries per program ID or observing night are not supported). And you can query either for Phase 3 data, or for the raw data. If you're interested in the raw data, you can select which instruments you want to query.
The phase 3 query is done using astroquery and it is quite fast. On the other hand, for the raw data, the program needs to find some keywords of the headers that are not always included in the general astroquery query. Therefore, for the raw data query, this package uses ADQL, which is provided by ESO. In general, this method is slower than using astroquery, especially if you are asking for many instruments.
In the preferences, you can enter your ESO login and password, but this is not required and the archive can be queried anonymously. Of course if you try to download your own observations before the release date, then you will not be able to do so. As mention later on, the login and password are stored locally on your computer and will remain private.
Once the query is done, if there are some results, they will be displayed in a Table with the following columns, for the Phase 3 data:
- OBJECT name: the name found in the header
- Instrument
- Mode
- Program ID
- Number of files
- PI
For the raw data query, the columns are:
- OBJECT name: the name found in the header
- Instrument
- Mode
- Program ID
- Observing date
- Release date
- Number of files
- PI and CoIs
On top of that, for both types queries, on the right side there will be additional information about the selected row.
Preferences can be accessed by clicking on the File button in the upper left corner of the interface.
The package will create a directory in $HOME/.config/esoquery/, meaning that all preferences are stored locally and will stay on your computer. There is only one file saved there:
- esoquery.conf: contains the login and password, a directory where to save the data, and a list of your favorite instruments.
In the preferences window, you can select the instruments that you would like to query for the raw data query (it doesn't matter for the phase 3 query). As mentioned before, querying for all instruments at once might be very slow and may result in a time out of the query. The instruments that you selected in the preferences window will appear in a drop-down menu on the main interface once you select Raw data.
After doing one query, you can select one of the row and press the Download button (upper right corner). There will be a pop-up window showing up where you can access the Preferences in case you need to change the download directory, and you can also select the kind of data you want. You can select from the following three options:
- Science files only
- Science and raw calibration files
- Science and processed calibration files
The first option will always be faster than the other two since the calibration cascade does not have to be run.
Once you start downloading something, there should be a progress bar that appears at the bottom of the interface, and you should not be able to use the program for a while (to avoid starting multiple download at the same time, I doubt this would work very well).
For the Phase 3 data, this choice does not matter since there is no calibration cascade to be run.
The requirements can be found below. The main interface is done using PyQt5. There are some scripts that come directly from the ESO webpages (eso_programmatic.py, provided here as well) which are using the pyvo package.
astropy==5.0.4
astroquery==0.4.6
matplotlib==3.4.3
numpy==1.17.4
PyQt5==5.15.9
pyvo==1.3
requests==2.22.0
xmltodict==0.12.0This package has only been tested on Linux, I have not idea if/how it will work on MacOS or Windows.
On Ubuntu, I added a file esoquery.desktop in $HOME/.local/share/applications containing the following:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=ESOQuery
GenericName=ESOQuery
Exec=python3 <path to the folder you downloaded>/EsoQuery/ESOQuery.py
Terminal=false
Type=Application
This should allow to start the application from your favorite launcher.
Otherwise, you can go to the folder where you downloaded this repository and start it using python3 ESOQuery.py.
- ALMA data for Phase 3 cannot be downloaded at the moment.