Archive Catalogues¶

The ESO Catalogue Facility provides access to the collection of catalogues and data that were produced by PIs of ESO programmes and then integrated into the ESO science archive through the Phase 3 process. The full list of available catalogues could be found here.

To access the data you can use the programmatic access via the tap_cat TAP Service. The module archive_catalogues provides some simple python wrapper around this.

More examples on how to use the TAP services for the ESO archive are provided in these notebooks.

Overview¶

The module archive_catalogues is based on the query_catalogues.ESOCatalogues class (a child of the query.Query class) that has the following attributes:

query – A string that contains the query to be perfomed via the TAP Service tap_cat
result_from_query – A table containing the result of the query
maxrec – An integer that the define the maximum number of records that will be returned for a query
type_of_query – A string that defines if the query will be run synchronously or asynchronously

After defining a query the result_from_query attribute is automatically filled by the method run_query(), for instance:

from ESOAsg.queries import query_catalogues
# define a query to obtain all `table_name` in the ESO Archive
query = 'SELECT schema_name, table_name from TAP_SCHEMA.tables'
# instantiate the class
all_catalogue_query = query_catalogues.ESOCatalogues(query=query)
# run the query
all_catalogue_query.run_query()
# print the result on terminal
all_catalogue_query.result_from_query.pprint()

The module archive_catalogue provides a set of additional quality-of-life functions to circumvent the actual creation of the queries. These allow one to directly obtain the information needed in a table format.

Some examples¶

Note

The way the queries are created allows one to set as input either collections or tables. However, we strongly discurage to use both at the same times. Given that the connector between the two conditions is an AND this may give rise to an un-expected behaviour

Which catalogues are available¶

In general, it is possible to explore which catalogue are available in the ESO archive either with the query interface webpage, or with the archive science portal, or by running the TAP query to obtain all versions of all catalogues:

SELECT
    cat_id, collection, table_name, title, number_rows, number_columns,
    version, acknowledgment
FROM
    TAP_SCHEMA.tables
WHERE
    schema_name = 'safcat'

or this one to obtain only the latest version of the catalogues:

SELECT
    t1.cat_id, t1.collection, t1.table_name, t1.title,
    t1.number_rows, t1.number_columns,
    t1.version, t1.acknowledgment
FROM
    tables t1
LEFT OUTER JOIN
    tables t2 ON (t1.title = t2.title AND t1.version < t2.version)
WHERE
   t2.title IS null AND t1.cat_id IS NOT null AND t1.schema_name = 'safcat'

Alternatively, it is possible to obtain an astropy.table containing information on all catalogues and all their versions using (note that the query is more complicated of the ones above because more information are collected):

from ESOAsg import archive_catalogues
archive_catalogues.all_catalogues_info(all_versions=True)

This returns an astropy.table containing:

Column name	Description
collection	Name of the Phase 3 collection the catalogue belongs to
title	Title of the catalogue
version	Version of the catalogue
table_name	The fully qualified table name
filter	Name(s) of the filter bandpasses the original data were aquired with
instrument	Name(s) of the instrument(s) the original data were acquired with
telescope	Name(s) of the telescope(s) the original data were acquired with
publication_date	The data the catalogue was published
description	Describes tables in the tableset
number_rows	Number of rows present in this version of the catalogue
number_columns	Number of columns present in this version of the catalogue
rel_descr_url	Location of the release description document (typically a pdf)
acknowledgment	It provides the sentence to be used in your publication when making use of this catalogue
cat_id	Internal catalogue identifier
mjd_obs	The observational data this catalogue is based were taken between mjd_obs and mjd_end
mjd_end	The observational data this catalogue is based were taken between mjd_obs and mjd_end
skysqdeg	Area of the sky (in square degrees) covered by this catalogue
bibliography	Bibliographic reference in the form of either a BIBCODE or a DOI
document_id	Internal identifier of the release description document 1
from_column	Column in the from_table
target_table	The table with the primary key
target_column	Column in the target_table
last_version	True if this is the latest version of the catalogue
RA_id	Identifier for RA in the catalogue
Dec_id	Identifier for Dec in the catalogue

Note

At first sight it may seem that not all cataloguess have the RA_id and Dec_id. This is because the catalogue is spread into more than one table. To identify the same source among the different tables of a catalogue the target_table and target_column should be used.

Which columns are in a catalogue¶

It is possible to get information on all columns present in a catalogue. For instance, the columns of the VIKING DR4 catalogue can be obtained running the following TAP query:

SELECT
    table_name, column_name, ucd, datatype, description, unit
FROM
    TAP_SCHEMA.columns
WHERE
    table_name = 'viking_er5_zyjj_1j_2hks_catMetaData_fits_V4'

A similar result can be obtained running:

archive_catalogues.columns_info(tables='viking_er5_zyjj_1j_2hks_catMetaData_fits_V4')

where the result is stored in an astropy.table.

Footnotes

1: The web user interface for this catalogue is reachable via the URL computed appending the cat_id to the string: https://www.eso.org/qi/catalogQuery/index/