[AstroPy] Astroquery module for Palomar Transient Factory data release?

[Leo Singer]

Hi,

This is a question about contributing some code to Astroquery to interact with the Palomar Transient Factory data release. I have some code that talks to IRSA's image server, which is currently used by WISE and PTF. The program interface is called IBE (not sure what it stands for). It supports cone searches and limited SQL-like queries to find images and catalog files for individual exposures. The system is described here:

http://www.ptf.caltech.edu/page/ibe

This is different from the existing astroquery.irsa module: that talks to a service called 'Gator' which provides access to catalogs; IBE, on the other hand, is designed for discovering data associated with given observations.

I would like to clean up my code and contribute it to Astroquery. Would this be better off as a new top-level package (astoquery.ibe), or as a new class inside astroquery.irsa?

Thanks,
Leo Singer
Graduate Student @ LIGO-Caltech