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zkbt / thefriendlystars

Python toolkit for making finder charts with catalogs that cover a small patch of the sky.
MIT License
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Modify query to allow magnitude limits. #2

Open zkbt opened 1 year ago

zkbt commented 1 year ago

Right now get_gaia will download all stars within a cone. Since we're often not doing anything with the faintest of those stars, and we often might want to expand out to wider fields of view where downloading every star will be prohibitive, we should add an option to limit the query just to stars brighter than a certain magnitude.

For example, get_gaia could have a keyword argument like faintest_magnitude_to_download= (or some such). A default of like 16 or 17 would serve as a good reference for TESS and many small-telescope ground-based observations; the user could push to fainter magnitudes like 20 or 21 to get a much richer field full of oodles of very faint stars.

zkbt commented 6 months ago

Right now, plot_gaia allows us to not plot stars fainter than a particular magnitude, but modifying the original query as described above would help make everything more efficient, by not wasting time downloading stars we might not use anyway.