Access to Catalogues: Example #3

Catalogues produced by PIs of ESO observing programmes are integrated into the ESO science archive through the Phase 3 process and are accessible either via the ESO Archive Science Portal, or via the Catalog Facility, or programmatically via the `tap_cat` service.

An example of the large amount of information present in the archive is illustrated by the Figure on the right, where we show the distribution of the first 5,000,000 sources present catalogues that contain data from the ESO-VISTA telescope. (The limit at 5,000,000 was set only for the sake of speeding up the data retrieval.)

The walk-through to obtain this information is illustrated in this notebook (it requires the installation of the un-official ESOAsg python package). The full dataset is also accessible following this Archive Science Portal link (where we we selected all catalogues obtained with VIRCAM and OMEGACAM data) or with the following TAP query:

SELECT
    cat_id, collection, table_name, title, number_rows, number_columns, 
    version, acknowledgment, telescope
FROM
    TAP_SCHEMA.tables
WHERE
    schema_name = 'safcat' AND
    telescope LIKE 'ESO-VISTA%'

More notebooks showing the power of the programmatic access are here.