The twin Keck telescopes atop Mauna Kea have been capturing photons from the cosmos for decades, accumulating an extraordinary archive of high-resolution spectra and imaging data. But accessing this scientific goldmine has traditionally required navigating complex interfaces and understanding archival structures that can intimidate even seasoned researchers.
PyKOA transforms this challenge into elegant Python simplicity. Built on the IVOA Table Access Protocol (TAP) standard, it delivers sophisticated querying capabilities that let you perform cone searches around your favorite exoplanet host stars, box searches across stellar formation regions, or temporal queries tracking variable objects over years of observations. The library provides seamless access to HIRES echelle spectrograph data - those incredibly detailed stellar spectra that reveal chemical compositions, radial velocities, and planetary signatures. Observatory PIs get secure access to their protected datasets, while the broader community can explore public archives with the same powerful interface.
Whether you’re hunting for Earth-like exoplanets in radial velocity data, studying stellar abundances across galactic populations, or building automated pipelines for large surveys, PyKOA puts world-class astronomical data at your fingertips. As more Keck instruments come online in the archive, this Python interface becomes your universal key to one of astronomy’s most valuable datasets - where every query might unlock the next cosmic discovery.
⭐ Stars: 3
💻 Language: Python
🔗 Repository: KeckObservatoryArchive/PyKOA