Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) Tips

Simple Jupyter notebook template for fetching images/data from KOA (modify the arguments for your own usage).

For fetching engineering star images/data (i.e. ‘engcalib’ images), look for keyword ‘ao_confirmation’ in the Astropy query results table (not the image FITS header itself) under the ‘target name’ keyword/column. These frequently include ‘ao_confirmation’ in either the OBJECT or COMMENT keywords of the corresponding FITS frames, but these are unreliable. Frequently, the COMMENT entry is ‘AOcheckout’ or ‘LGSAO Checkout’.