# astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python

## TL;DR

astroquery is a Python package that simplifies accessing astronomical data from web-based databases, enabling reproducible workflows and easy transition from web to command-line data retrieval.

## Contribution

It introduces a Python toolkit that interfaces with various astronomical data services, closely mimicking web interfaces for seamless data access and reproducibility.

## Key findings

- Supports multiple astronomical data services
- Facilitates reproducible data workflows
- Has active community contributions

## Abstract

astroquery is a collection of tools for requesting data from databases hosted on remote servers with interfaces exposed on the internet, including those with web pages but without formal application program interfaces (APIs). These tools are built on the Python requests package, which is used to make HTTP requests, and astropy, which provides most of the data parsing functionality. astroquery modules generally attempt to replicate the web page interface provided by a given service as closely as possible, making the transition from browser-based to command-line interaction easy. astroquery has received significant contributions from throughout the astronomical community, including several significant contributions from telescope archives. astroquery enables the creation of fully reproducible workflows from data acquisition through publication. This paper describes the philosophy, basic structure, and development model of the astroquery package. The complete documentation for astroquery can be found at http://astroquery.readthedocs.io/.