NSC DR2 full catalog

Question

Hello,

is there an easy way to download the full nsc_dr2.object table?

I need to perform an all-sky query to then cross-match to Gaia QSOs, but with sql is taking very long and often crashes even if I do sub-queries and perform some cuts.

Thanks a lot,

Elena

Answer 1

Hi Elena, thanks for reaching out. Downloading the entire nsc_dr2.object table will be difficult -- it's very big. We have done that on occasion, but for other institutions, and it required that they have access to Globus configured.

For your cross-match, would it help if you could use the pre-crossmatched table nsc_dr2.x1p5__object__gaia_dr2__gaia_source ? It's the xmatch of nsc_dr2.object against gaia_dr2.gaia_source, with a matching radius of 1.5 arcsec, keeping only the nearest match, and not keeping rows without a match. A JOIN operation on this table is much faster than a dedicated cross-match over the entire NSC DR2...

https://datalab.noirlab.edu/query.php?name=nsc_dr2.x1p5__object__gaia_dr2__gaia_source

Other tips on cutting down the size in your queries:

- only request a few columns, not '*'

- experiment while using subqueries (as you do) and LIMIT statements

- go in slices of RA maybe?
 

Also, please feel free to send us a minimal workflow example that shows what you are trying to achieve, and where it fails. We will of course try to help. You can email to datalab@noirlab.edu

Best regards,

Robert

Comments

Thanks a lot for your quick reply.

I imagined that would be too much, so in the end I uploaded my table and used your online cross-match tool, which was surprisingly fast!

I thought about using nsc_dr2.x1p5__object__gaia_dr2__gaia_source but I also need magnitude columns, not only positions.

Thank you again,
Elena

---

Glad you got it to work.

The point / bonus of the pre-crossmatched tables is that one can then JOIN on either of the ID columns in those tables (which is much faster than cross-matching). So, you could use the pre-crossmatch tables to find the IDs you need, and then join on those IDs with other tables. Some examples are given in this notebook:

https://github.com/noaodatalab/notebooks-latest/blob/master/04_HowTos/CrossmatchTables/How_to_use_pre_crossmatched_tables.ipynb

Best,
Robert