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

Its development was launched by the 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 to allow astronomers and tool developers to access data and services from remote archives and other web resources. It takes advantage of 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.

Source code can be found on GitHub

Releases of PyVO are available from PyPI thus, it and its prerequisites can be most easily installed using pip:

pip install pyvo

Alternatively, you can do a source install:

python setup.py install

Many instructive examples can be found in the PyVO Documentation. 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