Look Up

I often find myself needing to get coordinates for various astronomical objects by name. There are several services out there to do this sort of thing already but all have different interfaces and cover specific types of astronomical objects. For instance NED covers extra-galactic objects and Simbad is mostly objects within the galaxy but doesn't include the solar system, recent supernovae or recent exoplanets. All I wanted was one place to go to look up anything.

I played about with this before but previously my emphasis was in generating the AVM microformat. Recently I decided to put the emphasis on simply returning the information and providing links to useful resources. I also fixed a bug in the software that talked to NED so that now works properly. After eliciting some ideas for a new name on Twitter, I finally settled on lookUP (suggested by timtfj) as it seemed quite appropriate. In terms of the interface, the main page has been reduced down to a large input box with a few examples underneath. The output provides the coordinates of the objects, the object type, and links to the object on Wikisky/Google Sky/Flickr. The only thing it still doesn't cover is comets because I can't find a nice service for those and don't really want to have to make my own.

If you find lookUP useful, please do let me know.

Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Thursday 05th Mar 2009 (18:26 GMT) | 5 Comments | Permalink

Comments: Look Up

Are there restrictions on access etc? How many times can I hit this in an hour, for example?

I am plotting many, many uses for this :)

Posted by Robert Simpson on Thursday 05th Mar 2009 (19:10 UTC)

Nobody ever seems to use the stuff I build so I hadn't really thought that far!

The problems will come from polling the different services. My program steps through them until it finds a match so Simbad bears the brunt of the requests followed by NED. Having said that, there are *some* pre-checks for obvious planets/moons/supernova so that I use the most appropriate service straight away.

There aren't any limits at the moment. However, if you start slowing down our server (or I get angry emails from Simbad/NED) I'll have to add some. :-)

Posted by Stuart on Thursday 05th Mar 2009 (19:24 UTC)

Looking at the handy links you get (the "view maps" thing, plus the Flickr lookup), is there a way to get, or have you considered the idea of providing, a facility where you can say "build me the URL to go find more information on some service"?

Eg:

http://www.jodcast.net/lookUP/redirect/radio/?name=sirius

would return:

http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/runquery.pl?Interface=quick&Position=sirius&SURVEY=0408Mhz

or something similar.

Posted by Dave Pearson on Thursday 05th Mar 2009 (21:29 UTC)

@Dave Would it actually redirect or just provide the text of the redirect?

I've added some preliminary support for Galaxy Zoo object numbers. This currently requires two requests to SDSS because they don't seem to have a simple algorithm to work out the required ID numbers.

Posted by Stuart on Thursday 05th Mar 2009 (23:03 UTC)

This article has been added to the Astronomy Link List.