Project

Project AstroSearcher was created in May 2021 as a part of bachelor’s thesis developed by Ľuboslav Halama in cooperation with Ernst Paunzen.
Astrosearcher’s goal is to improve searching of astronomical objects in three of the largest international astronomical databases - MAST, Simbad, and Vizier.

Searching

AstroSearcher serves as interface between user and astronomical databases and provides unified searching in multiple databases at once.

Search form can be divided into two main groups by its parameters - compulsory and optional.
Compulsory - these parameters include:

• Search type - specifies what type of search parameters are used
• Search input - used for queries by id/name (e.g. Sirius) and position (<number> <number>, e.g. 85.0 -5.8)
• File - in case of query by file with coordinates, file must be uploaded (with the first row containing line: "ra,dec", other rows with coordinates in decimal format)

Optional - these parameters include:

• Radius - radius can be specified in order to make search more precise
• Page size - size of the output
• Page - MAST parameter, output is divided into blocks with "page size" where "page" specifies block’s number.
• Vizier type and input - words (specific words defined by Vizier) or code (codes of Vizier catalogues separated by space)
• Checkboxes - specifies which service should be queried