Archive Science Portal

The Archive Science Portal provides the primary entry point for interactive searching and browsing of the ESO Science Archive using an intuitive interactive user interface that supports iterative queries.

The archive contains both pipeline-processed data streams of many La Silla-Paranal instruments and a large collection of coherent data sets provided by users of ESO telescopes’ time including the results of Public Surveys.

The module archive_science_portal provides some simple functions to create an url corresponding to your search.

Please, when you use data from the archive, follow the ESO Data Access Policy.

Overview

The module archive_science_portal uses core.asp_queries to create the url that links to your query at ASP. The basic idea is to start from the base url and keep adding conditions until your search criteria is satisfied. For instance, to search for all the FORS2 and XSHOOTER spectra present in the archive:

from ESOAsg.core import asp_queries
# define the lists of instruments and data_types to be queried
instruments = ['FORS2', 'XSHOOOTER']
data_types = ['spectrum']
# create the url
url = '{0}{1}{2}'.format(asp_queries.base_url(),
                         asp_queries.condition_instruments(instruments),
                         asp_queries.condition_data_types(data_types, connector='&'))
# run the query
asp_queries.run_query(url)

This will open this link on your browser.

The module archive_science_portal provides a set of functions to avoid the actual creation of the url by the user and to just obtain the link(s) to the page she/he is interested in.

Some examples

query to a specific position in the sky

In early 2019 the red supergiant star Betelgeuse began to dim (see, ESO science release #2003). To open a page containing all the reduced spectra and data cubes associated to the star, you can run:

from astropy.coordinates import SkyCoord
from ESOAsg import archive_science_portal
# resolve the star location from the name
star_position = SkyCoord.from_name('Betelgeuse')
# run the query with a search radius of 5 arcseconds anse selection spectrum and cube
# as data types
archive_science_portal.query_from_radec(star_position, radius=5., open_link=True,
                                        data_types=['spectrum', 'cube'])

This will open this page on your broswer. From there you can select the data to download (currently, Aug. 2020, 57 spectra from HARPS, UVES, and XSHOOTER and 10 datacubes from ALMA could be retrieved).

query to a polygon in the sky

The version 2.0 of the archive science portal offers the possibility of searching data withing irregular polygons. This is a relevant tool to detect electromagnetic counterpart of gravitational wave detections.

This possibility is provided by the archive_science_portal.query_from_polygons function. For instance, following the procedure described in this jupyter notebook, you can investigate which data are present within the 50% confidence contours of the location of the GW superevent s191205ah. The code will open the following 3 pages: Polygon-1, Polygon-2, and Polygon-3.

The ESOAsg package also provides the get_data_from_gw_event script to fully exploit this functionality (see Archive Access Scripts for futher details).