Downloading Mission-Specific Data with Astroquery

[snbianco]

A notebook detailing the workflow for searching datasets, retrieving data products, and downloading data products using astroquery.mast.MastMissions, a wrapper to the MAST Search API. These changes haven't been merged into Astroquery yet (why the tests are failing), so leaving as a draft for now.

[snbianco]

Tagging @ttdu @astrojimig @dr-rodriguez @adrianlucy for visibility

[snbianco]

The Astroquery changes have been merged, so this is now ready for review!

[astrojimig]

This looks great! A really nice overview of the new additions to the MissionsMast Class. I downloaded & ran it locally with no errors. This update is going to be so useful for users, and this notebook does a great job to highlight its features!

Just a few small notes:

• Remember to update the table of contents file and the chapter readme with this new notebook too!
• “Searching MAST using astroquery.mast notebook” -> consider using the html render instead of the GitHub link?
• You might want to link the Outerspace API guide when you introduce the “MAST Search API”: https://outerspace.stsci.edu/display/MASTDOCS/Using+MAST+APIs (there’s also some pages on auth tokens there you could link later). I think it's slightly more user-friendly than the direct docs link, but it would be good to have both
• “The following missions/products are available for search at time of writing” -> specify “as of Jan 2025” or similar?
• “instantiate” - > initiate?
• There are a few places in the markdown cells where you note exact numbers (..."There were 681 total results"..."19 HST datasets fall within our cone search."...). How future-proof are these numbers? If HST observes M1 again, the numbers in the notebook might be outdated. I like including them so the user can self-verify, but maybe an alternative could be changing the language to be more vague ("There are over 600 total results...") or including the date (as of Dec 2024, there are 681 total results...). I don't feel strongly about this either way, so do whatever you think it best!

[ttdu]

* There are a few places in the markdown cells where you note exact numbers (..."There were 681 total results"..."19 HST datasets fall within our cone search."...). How future-proof are these numbers? If HST observes M1 again, the numbers in the notebook might be outdated. I like including them so the user can self-verify, but maybe an alternative could be changing the language to be more vague ("There are over 600 total results...") or including the date (as of Dec 2024, there are 681 total results...). I don't feel strongly about this either way, so do whatever you think it best!

Chiming in to agree with Julie! I tend to use vague language (i.e. "over 600 results").

[snbianco]

Thank you @astrojimig and @ttdu, this is great feedback! I'll make these changes sometime today and ping again.

[snbianco]

Just pushed those changes! The only thing is that I didn't see anything about the MAST Search API on the Outerspace API guide; it only talks about the portal API. I think that the Swagger docs may be the only thing we have for the MAST Search API at the moment.