CFHT_dataquery

Software Description

The Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) allows us to retrieve public data from various telecopes and instruments via a WWW interface and interactively via shell scripts and programs. Based on Peter Erwin’s telarchive Python scripts we wrote several Python and bash shell scripts to comfortably retrieve imaging data from the CFHT telescope via the UNIX command line.

The software provides you with scripts to perform the following tasks:

1. Obtain a list of images you want to retrieve from CADC, i.e. query the archive for available data on a given sky position, from a certain Principal Investigator etc.
2. Retrieve the data
3. Validate, Unpack and Compress retrieved data

Software Prerequisites

To use the software your system needs to fulfil the following requirements:

• An internet connection
• Python in version 2.X with X>=5; currently the scripts are NOT Python 3.x compatible!
• The UNIX tools awk, sort, uniq, cat and wget
• The fitsverify program (developed within FITSIO) to validate retrieved data
• To extract/uncompress retrieved images you also need the imcopy tool (developed within FITSIO)

Software Download

Please find the latest version of the software here

Software Authors and Software License

The software is maintained by Thomas Erben at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomy in Bonn/Germany. Please email_me with your questions, suggestions and comments. CFHT_dataquery is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Core parts of the software originate from Peter Erwins telarchive tool.