Open lucaberti opened 2 years ago
I was about to say "maybe we should glance at the astroquery package, I've heard it supports lots of different data sources?" but WOW, I just looked at it and, including its 22 dependent packages, it requires 35 MB of Python packages to download and install. So I guess that's going to be way too heavyweight for me to be tempted to recommend it!
How much code was necessary to talk to SIMBAD? If it's within a factor of 2× of the size of something like mpc.py
(which looks to be around 260 lines long), then your code might be a good fit for Skyfield's data
subpackage!
Two files, ~180 lines and about 12KB. (and the divison in two files is just for future new uses)
Does it have any dependencies outside the Standard Library and Pandas? I've been trying to keep Skyfield from accumulating too many more :) In any case, yes, I'd be interested to see the code!
I added you to the project. You can find it in skyfield/skyfieldquery directory. You can execute the simbad.py (it has an example code as main)
Thanks! I'll plan to read over the code tomorrow morning and see what I think.
Btw dependencies are Requests, Csv and Pandas. Pandas it's just needed to return a DataFrame, which is there only for compatibility with the Star Object. It could also be avoided, since the class can create Stars objects from its own.
Forgot to mention that the code is (still) under the dev branch
I've looked over your code, and it does look like the basic function of running a query and returning a dataframe that can become a Star
object will be a good fit for Skyfield. It may be a couple of months before other projects give me time to dive in and adapt the code to create a new skyfield.data
module, but in the meantime I have forked your repository so that I can always get back to this version of the code even if you need to change or delete the branch in your own repository. Thanks!
Thank you for this project! I'm glad (and somewhat proud) that my work helps you in some way to grow it.
Hello @brandon-rhodes. Hope you are doing good. I'm thinking of, finally, starting working back on my project. Just wanted to check if SIMBAD integration is gone forward or if I will develop it further by myself. Thank you :)
Alas, no, I have not yet sat down to integrate the SIMBAD logic into Skyfield — other priorities keep getting in the way. So please feel free to keep extending and using your own version!
Hello, I started a project where I wanted to calculate deep sky objects ephemeris. This quickly led me to manually create Stars object based on SIMBAD database (http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/). Since i could not find a native way to access a broader star catalogue - beside hipparcos - and since I needed a quicker way to create the Star object that I needed, I created a script to retrieve the SIMBAD data and automatically create the Star objects. I also added the possibility to output data as DataFrame or as a list of dictionaries. The code works fine, but it is not near as refined as I like. Nevertheless it could be a good add to the skyfield tools. Here is my question: it coudl be added directly to this project or is best to have it separated and installed as a separate package?