The Gaia Mission¶
Display data from Gaia
All thanks to the European Space Agency for data and images such as this.
This module uses the astroquery.gaia submodule to query the Gaia database.
I am still finding my way around the data (almost June 2020).
It is a record of over a billion observations.
Many variables, along with error estimates too.
The plan for now is to download a bunch of random samples, asynchronously.
Save each sample in fits format.
And then explore the data.
Data downloaded is cached in the current directory.
The same is checked for data from a previous run and that will be read in before loading any further data.
Would be good to be able to be able to share bunches of data, that is part of the more general problem of distributed data.
See -bunch and -topn command line options for how to control how many bunches are downloaded and how big each bunch is.
The idea here is to look into the question, of just where is the sun?
Specifically, where is it relative to the galactic centre?
Recognising that the galactic centre is a bit of a puzzle itself.