The Astrocats package enables astronomers to construct their own curated catalogs of astronomical data with the intention of producing shareable catalogs of that data in human-readable formats. Astrocats is used by several existing open astronomy catalogs, including:

• The Open Supernova Catalog [GitHub repo]
• The Open TDE Catalog [GitHub repo]
• The Open Nova Catalog [GitHub repo]
• The Open Black Hole Catalog [GitHub repo]

The process for creating one's own open astronomy catalog involves checking out this package and designing a "module" for it that is specific to that catalog's needs, a Wiki is available with instructions for doing so. At the moment the most developed module is the Open Supernova Catalog module; to set up astrocats with the supernovae module, one needs to check out two repositories:

git clone [email protected]:astrocatalogs/astrocats.git
cd astrocats
git clone [email protected]:astrocatalogs/supernovae.git

Astrocats will soon be listed on PyPi, at which point the install instructions will involve pip and a setup script, for now the install must be performed manually.