Hipparcos
Description
ESA's Hipparcos space astrometry mission was a pioneering European project which pinpointed the positions of more than one hundred thousand stars with high precision, and more than one million stars with lesser precision.
Launched in August 1989, Hipparcos successfully observed the celestial sphere for 3.5 years before operations ceased in March 1993. Calculations from observations by the main instrument generated the Hipparcos Catalogue of 118,218 stars charted with the highest precision. An auxiliary star mapper pinpointed many more stars with lesser but still unprecedented accuracy, in the Tycho Catalogue of 1,058,332 stars.
More info at ESA - Hipparcos overview
Data Access
The Hipparcos data are accessible by a variety of means:
Data Lab Table Access Protocol (TAP) service
TAP provides a convenient access layer to the Hipparcos catalog database. TAP-aware clients (such as TOPCAT) can point to https://datalab.noirlab.edu/tap, select the hipparcos or hipparcos2 database, and see the database tables and descriptions. You can also view the Hipparcos tables and descriptions in the Data Lab table browser.
Data Lab Query Client
The Query Client is available as part of the Data Lab software distribution. The Query Client provides a Python API to Data Lab database services. These services include anonymous and authenticated access through synchronous or asynchronous queries of the catalog made directly to the database. Additional Data Lab services for registered users include personal database storage and storage through the Data Lab VOSpace.
The Query Client can be called from a Jupyter Notebook on the Data Lab Notebook server. Example notebooks are provided to users upon creation of their user account (register here), and are also available to browse on GitHub at https://github.com/astro-datalab/notebooks-latest.
