UKIRT Use Cases and FAQs
The following Q&A provides instructions for specific use cases for accessing UKIRT data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. If you have other questions, please contact us via the Helpdesk.
Q: How do I get all the light curves from UKIRT?
With light curves for 66 million objects, the complete data set in ASCII format is 265 GB. If you would like to download all the data, go to the UKIRT bulk download page and click the UKIRT Bulk Time Series wget scripts (by Year, Field ID, and CCD ID) link. This contains a set of wget scripts (see wget help) that will download all UKIRT light curves.
Q: How do I find a single object?
Go to the UKIRT search page and enter the name or coordinates into the Single Location box and a value in the Radius box and click Submit. Note that the Source ID field can be used if you know the UKIRT Source ID (e.g., ukirt_c_2016_s_33_1_0065104).
If the object exists in the archived data set, it will be returned in a new tab. From here you can:
- Download the time series: Double-click on the blue info icon
and select Download Time Series, which will generate a wget script to retrieve the IPAC ASCII .tbl time-series file. - Download a wget script to get the light curves for all objects returned by the search. Select Get Time Series along the top row and choose Results Wget Script. Once you save the wget script on your computer, you can run it to retrieve all light curves (see wget help).
Q. What is the UKIRT astrometric error for a minimum search radius in a single-object search?
The astrometry is approximately good to about 0.1 pixel or about 0.05".
Last updated: 1 March 2022
