How to switch mirror?

[kgullikson88]

I am using astroquery v0.2.2, and am wondering if there is a way to tell astroquery to use a specific mirror for simbad (or other services, but I mostly care about simbad)? I see that the mirror to use is defined in the init.py for astroquery.simbad, but it looks like I would have to go in and edit the code to whatever mirror I want. Is there a way to change the mirror from the astroquery api?

[keflavich]

Yes. You can change Simbad.SIMBAD_URL interactively, or you can configure the default in your ~/.astropy/config/astroquery.cfg file. You should be able to change the default URL for a given session by changing astroquery.simbad.conf.server, then every subsequent Simbad instance should use that server.

For more details about the configuration system, see http://docs.astropy.org/en/v1.0/config/index.html

[kelle]

The Strasburg SIMBAD site is currently down and we (me and @SherelynA) are trying to change the astroquery.simbad.conf.server and am having a hard time. What we tried:

from astroquery.simbad import conf
conf.server = `simbad.harvard.edu`

But the code is still returning an error that says
503 Service Error. Service unavailable for http://simbad.u_strasburg.fr/simbad/sim

[keflavich]

Change Simbad.SIMBAD_URL. Changing the conf at runtime has no effect; I was wrong in 2015.

[kelle]

Thanks for the clarification!!

from astroquery.simbad import Simbad
Simbad.SERVER = 'harvard.simbad.edu'

or

Simbad.SIMBAD_URL = 'harvard.simbad.edu'

I don't see anything about SIMBAD_URL in the docs.

[keflavich]

Simbad.SIMBAD_URL='http://harvard.simbad.edu/simbad/sim-script'

this is definitely something we should fix, both in terms of documenting and likely URLs

so what it should be (but isn't now) is
Simbad.URL = 'harvard.simbad.edu'
or similar.

[bsipocz]

@keflavich - the URL part is picked up from the config, use it as it's intended and documented and it all works as expected: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#default-configuration-file
There is one typo in that default render, namely that the field is called server and not simbad_server, so it's not enough to uncomment and change the value.

In [1]: from astroquery.simbad import Simbad

In [2]: Simbad.SIMBAD_URL
Out[2]: 'http://simbad.harvard.edu/simbad/sim-script'

In [3]: Simbad.query_object("m1")
Out[3]: 
<Table length=1>
MAIN_ID      RA         DEC     RA_PREC DEC_PREC COO_ERR_MAJA ... COO_ERR_ANGLE COO_QUAL COO_WAVELENGTH     COO_BIBCODE     SCRIPT_NUMBER_ID
          "h:m:s"     "d:m:s"                        mas      ...      deg                                                                  
 object    str13       str13     int16   int16     float32    ...     int16       str1        str1             object            int32      
------- ----------- ----------- ------- -------- ------------ ... ------------- -------- -------------- ------------------- ----------------
  M   1 05 34 31.94 +22 00 52.2       6        6           -- ...             0        C              R 2011A&A...533A..10L                1

The config itself can be successfully updated at runtime, too, but there I think there is some instantiation issue and the class is not picking up the updated value neither when changed globally nor in a context manager.