PyNOMAD 0.1.1.dev26

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

======= PyNOMAD =======

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])