PyNOMAD 0.1.0

Routines for accessing a self-hosted local copy of the USNO NOMAD stellar catalog

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PyNOMAD
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PyNOMAD is used for accessing a locally hosted copy of The Naval
Observatory Merged Astrometric Dataset (NOMAD). More information on
NOMAD is available at:
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/nomad/

Full copies of the NOMAD catalog are large:
92Gigs uncompressed
or
30Gigs when compressed with: gzip --best nomad/[0-9][0-9][0-9]/m*

The nomad.py module works with either uncompressed or compressed copies
of the catalog.

A typical usage to fetch a region of the catalog is:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from nomad import fetch_nomad_box

ra_range = [281., 281.05] # RA is in degrees
dec_range = [-30.6, -30.55] # Dec is in degrees
stars = fetch_nomad_box(ra_range, dec_range, epoch=2000.0)

A typical usage to retrieve by NOMAD catalog ID is:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from nomad import fetch_star_by_nomad_id

star = fetch_star_by_nomad_id(['0594-0896798'], epoch=None)

stars = fetch_star_by_nomad_id(['0594-0896794', '0594-0896795',
'0594-0896796', '0594-0896798'], epoch=None)

Note that in all cases the returned object is a `pandas.DataFrame`.



Some catalog data files used for testing the code are included in:
test/data
These are grabbed directly from USNO's website serving the NOMAD database:
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/data/fchpix/
These can be used to perform one-time tests cross-checking that the nomad
module is working correctly with the local copy of the catalog.
These tests (and some other internal consistency checks) can be run by
using the nomad_test.py module:
python nomad_test.py

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Originally written 2013-04-05 by Henry Roe ([e-mail])