Virtual Observatory Access (astropy.vo)

Introduction

The astropy.vo subpackage handles simple access for Virtual Observatory (VO) services.

Current services include:

• VO Simple Cone Search
• SAMP (Simple Application Messaging Protocol (astropy.vo.samp)

Other third-party Python packages and tools related to astropy.vo:

• PyVO provides further functionality to discover and query VO services. Its user guide contains a good introduction to how the VO works.
• Astroquery is an Astropy affiliated package that provides simply access to specific astronomical web services, many of which do not support the VO protocol.
• Simple-Cone-Search-Creator shows how to ingest a catalog into a cone search service and serve it in VO standard format using Python (using CSV files and healpy).