Querying all HEASARC data/observations for a range of times for a particular mission

[parsotat]

HI there,

I am coming back to astroquery after using version 0.4.5. In that version I was able to query all the data in a time range and then do additional filtering based on the field of view of the instrument that I am interested in (the BAT with a large FOV). I would do this like

heasarc = Heasarc()
queryargs = dict(time="2004-12-15..2006-10-27", fields='All', resultmax=0)
table = heasarc.query_object(object_name=None, mission="swiftmastr", **queryargs)

Looking through the documentation for the v0.4.11.dev274, it isn't clear to me how this translates to the changes API, even after trying some of the new functions. They all seem to rely on querying a point or a region in the sky. Is there a recommended way to query with respect to time and not a coordinate?

[bsipocz]

cc @zoghbi-a

[zoghbi-a]

To query using time selection, the new API uses TAP protocol with SQL-like selection:

from astroquery.heasarc import Heasarc
from astropy.time import Time

t1 = Time('2004-12-15')
t2 = Time('2006-10-27')
query = f'SELECT * FROM swiftmastr WHERE start_time BETWEEN {t1.mjd} AND {t2.mjd}'
table = Heasarc.query_tap(query).to_table()

To list all the columns that you can select on:

Heasarc.list_columns('swiftmastr', full=True)

[bsipocz]

I'm certainly considering adding some non spatial constraints for IRSA's query_region, if you're interested in doing something similar for heasarc I would be happy to coordinate on the API before shipping ours.

#3223

That being said, I'm adding the documentation label here as non spatial examples, even doing them the hard way via directly writing ADQL is currently missing from the docs.

[parsotat]

Thanks @zoghbi-a, that is very helpful.

I would also advocate for a way to do non-spatial constraints via a method since there are many wide FOV gamma-ray missions which are critical for time domain and multimessenger astronomy where querying on time can be the easiest and then filtering tables based on location within the FOV can be done.

[zoghbi-a]

@bsipocz, yes. that would be useful.