CASPER Astro Tools
Copyright 2026 CAMCEAD, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE).

CASPER Astro Tools is the open, public part of CASPER, the assistant platform of CAMCEAD at the
Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. It contains code adapted from astronomy tool servers
developed at the Institute of Astronomy, released here under the Apache License 2.0.

Third-party services and data
-----------------------------
The package is a client of public services: NASA ADS, arXiv, CDS (SIMBAD, VizieR, Sesame, X-Match,
hips2fits), NED, IRSA, ESA Gaia, MAST, ESO, HEASARC, CADC, ALMA, SDSS, NOIRLab Astro Data Lab and the
IVOA registry. Their data and terms are theirs. If you publish results obtained through this package,
acknowledge the services you used as each of them asks; the acknowledgement sentences, citations and
the terms are in docs/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md and docs/DATA_AND_TERMS.md. In short:

  * This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.
  * This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France
    (DOI: 10.26093/cds/vizier).
  * This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is funded by the
    National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology.
  * This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia
    (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium
    (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium).
  * This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services.
  * This research made use of Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python
    package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration, 2013, 2018, 2022).
  * arXiv, Sesame, X-Match, hips2fits and the Virtual Observatory: see docs/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md
    (reviewed and accepted by the authors on 2026-11-01; where a service publishes different wording, use the service's).

Recorded excerpts
-----------------
The files under src/casper_astro_tools/data/fixtures are short excerpts of answers of the public
services, recorded read-only on the date written in each file's "_meta" mark and kept for tests,
documentation and offline replay. The content belongs to the services. NASA ADS content is NOT
redistributed: the ADS examples are invented stand-ins labelled "[synthetic]". The files under
tests/fixtures are hand-written, synthetic and marked as such.
