PyVO is a package providing access to remote data and services of the Virtual observatory (VO) using Python.

Its development was launched by NSF/NASA-funded Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO, www.usvao.org) project (formerly under the name VAOpy) as part of its initiative to bring VO capabilities to desktop. Its goal is allow astronomers and tool developers to access data and services from remote archives and other web resources. It takes advantage VO standards to give access to thousands of catalogs, data archives, information services, and analysis tools. It also takes advantage of the general capabilities of Astopy (and numpy), and so a secondary goal is to provide a development platform for migrating more VO capabilities into Astropy.

Information about this package, including latest releases, can be found at:

http://dev.usvao.org/vao/wiki/Products/PyVO

Source code can be found on GitHub at:

http://github.com/pyvirtobs/pyvo

This implementation requires the following prerequisite packages:

• numpy (1.6.0 or later)
• astropy (0.2 or later)

These must be installed before install PyVO.

As an Astropy affiliate, this package uses the Astropy build infrastructure.

Releases of PyVO are available from PyPI <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyvo>; thus, it and its prerequisites can be most easily installed using pip:

pip install pyvo

Alternatively, you can download and unpack a source tar-ball (pyvo-x.x.tar.gz). To install directly into the python installation, type as root user inside the distributions root directory:

python setup.py install

To install into a special directory called, say, $MYPYVO (which need not require root permission), first be sure that astropy and numpy are in your PYTHONPATH (if they are also installed in a non-standard place). Next, try:

python setup.py install --home=$MYPYVO

To just try out PyVO in this directory, you can build it in "developer" mode via:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

In this mode, update your PYTHONPATH to include the directory containing this file.

Many instructive examples can be found in the PyVO User's Manual (http://pyvo.readthedocs.org). Additional examples can be found in the scripts directory.

PyVO uses the Astropy framework for unit tests which is built into the setup script. To run the tests, type:

python setup.py test

This will run all unit tests that do not require a network connection. To run all tests, including those that access the network, add the --remote-data (-R) option:

python setup.py test -R