Unfortunately although a lot of astronomy image/catalog services allow uploading a file of object names or coordinates to query, it seems the NVSS postage stamp server is not one of them. The only way I can see to do it is to submit the form data to the server's CGI program.
To do this you can use something like curl
(which should be included on recent builds of Windows 10 according to this website; otherwise it gives instructions on how to get it) or if you are doing this as part of a bigger project, then you could use something like Python's requests
library (example on how to pass form data using requests
is here) to do the same thing. An example using curl
for Markarian 143 would be:
curl https://www.cv.nrao.edu/cgi-bin/postage.pl -d "Equinox=J2000&PolType=I&MAPROJ=SIN&rotate=0.0&Type=image/jpeg&RA=10 26 53&Dec=+62 20 11&Size=1 1&Cells=15 15" -o postage.jpg
This passes values to all the form's fields (found from doing a 'view source' on the webpage) to the postage stamp-making CGI code and save the output in a file called postage.jpg
. You could wrap this up as part of script to insert the RA and Dec values into the curl
line and save the output with a per-object filename - messy but do-able. As a final note, if you going to let this rip on all 1544 galaxies, I would add a delay of a few 10s of seconds between each call as a courtesy and not blast the NVSS endpoint with requests.
Here's a brief setup guide for Python+astroquery on Windows 10 to allow NED queries:
Obtain and install latest 3.10 version from Python.org - the 64bit version is generally recommended. (Selecting the option to add the Python.exe
to the PATH
is a good idea and makes the following commands much easier if you don't need to keep putting in the full path to python everytime)
From a Windows command prompt, setup up a virtual environment to keep things clean and separate (this assumes it has put you into the C:\Users\<username>\
directory - default I think) :
a. python -m venv .\venvs\nvss-venv
(I like to make all my virtualenvs in a directory (venvs
) and name them after what they do (nvss-venv
) but this is up to you)
b. Activate virtualenv with .\venvs\nvss-venv\Scripts\activate.bat
c. Install Python modules: pip install astroquery ipython
(astroquery
will pull in the needed Astropy; ipython
is optional but adds a much nicer command shell for exploring Python)
From the Python or IPython command line you can do (this is just the very first part from the tutorial in the astroquery
docs - more info on tuning the query and other features there):
from astroquery.ipac.ned import Ned
result_table = Ned.query_object("Mrk 123")
print(result_table[('Object Name', 'RA', 'DEC')])
Results are shown in the screenshot below (not sure what numpy is complaining about it, it seems to be doing that a lot with the 1.22 version)
