IRSA Queries (astroquery.ipac.irsa)

Getting Started

This module provides access to the public astrophysics catalogs, images, and spectra curated by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at Caltech. IRSA hosts data from many missions, including Euclid, Spitzer, WISE/NEOWISE, SOFIA, IRTF, 2MASS, Herschel, IRAS, and ZTF.

Below we provide examples of common searches.

Simple Spectral Access Queries

query_ssa provides a way to access IRSA’s Simple Spectral Access VO service. In the following example we are looking for Spitzer Enhanced Imaging products in the centre of the COSMOS field as a Table.

>>> from astroquery.ipac.irsa import Irsa
>>> from astropy.coordinates import SkyCoord
>>> from astropy import units as u
>>>
>>> coord = pos = SkyCoord.from_name('Arp 220')
>>> arp220_spectra = Irsa.query_ssa(pos=coord)

Without specifying the collection, the query returns results from multiple collections. For example this target has spectra from SOFIA as well as from Spitzer.

>>> from astropy.table import unique
>>> unique(arp220_spectra, keys='dataid_collection')['dataid_collection']
<MaskedColumn name='dataid_collection' dtype='object' description='IVOA Identifier of collection' length=5>
         goals
herschel_herus
  sofia_fifils
spitzer_irsenh
   spitzer_sha

To list available collections for SSA queries, the list_collections method is provided, and will return a Table.

>>> from astroquery.ipac.irsa import Irsa
>>> Irsa.list_collections(servicetype='SSA')
<Table length=41>
       collection
         object
------------------------
                   champ
                   goals
          herschel_digit
       herschel_gotcplus
                     ...
             spitzer_sha
           spitzer_sings
           spitzer_ssgss
                    swas
                 thrumms

Other Configurations

By default the maximum number of rows that is fetched is set to 500. However, this option may be changed by changing the astroquery configuration file. To change the setting only for the ongoing python session, you could also do:

>>> from astroquery.ipac.irsa import Irsa
>>> Irsa.ROW_LIMIT = 1000   # 1000 is the new value for row limit here.

Reference/API

astroquery.ipac.irsa Package

IRSA Query Tool

This module contains various methods for querying the IRSA Services.

Classes

IrsaClass()

MostClass()

Conf()

Configuration parameters for astroquery.ipac.irsa.