zkbt / thefriendlystars

Python toolkit for making finder charts with catalogs that cover a small patch of the sky.
MIT License
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Get Gaia prism spectra for all the stars! #4

Open zkbt opened 4 months ago

zkbt commented 4 months ago

Gaia has observed low-resolution spectra of basically all the stars and high resolution radial velocity + stellar characterization spectra for bright stars. It would be super neat to be able to plot spectra and/or label with stellar spectral types next to many of the bright stars in a field.

Starting from the existing get_gaia, this would involve downloading spectra and/or additional table columns. A few starting steps would be:

zkbt commented 4 months ago

I think https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/gaiaxpy is probably essential here! The prism spectra are stored in (probably very clever but also deeply non-intuitive) weird orthonormal bases, and this tool helps with the math to get to actual spectra.

zkbt commented 4 months ago

@Autumn10677 , I think starting with the light curves before this might be wise?