astroquery

astroquery is an open-source Python package that provides a uniform interface to a wide range of online astronomical databases and data archives. It is maintained as an affiliated package of the Astropy project and is designed to simplify programmatic access to remote services used by researchers and educators.

The package offers modular access to many major astronomy services, including Vizier, SIMBAD, NED, Gaia, SDSS, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, IRSA, Chandra, XMM-Newton, HEASARC, and other data providers. Users can perform searches by object name, celestial coordinates, or region, and retrieve catalogs, metadata, and data products. Results are typically returned as Astropy Table objects, with convenient options to convert to other formats such as pandas DataFrames. Common workflows involve query_object, query_region, and related helper functions, along with capabilities to download imaging or spectral data when available.

astroquery relies on web protocols and, where applicable, Virtual Observatory standards to access remote services. It abstracts service-specific details behind a common API, enabling researchers to combine queries across multiple archives in a single Python session. The project emphasizes extensibility and community contributions, continually updating wrappers to reflect changes in the underlying services. Documentation and examples are provided to help users integrate astroquery into data analysis pipelines, teaching materials, and reproducible research workflows.

In summary, astroquery streamlines the discovery and retrieval of astronomical data from a broad ecosystem of archives, offering a cohesive, Pythonic interface that complements the broader Astropy ecosystem.