Issue with 'sdss-target-selection'

[sarkatos]

Hi,
I tried to install the 'sdss-target-selection' AFTER installing numpy, and that happened:
output_of_terminal.txt
We(some LSST AGN SC members) actually just wanted to find the AQMES AGNs/Quasar objects' cordinates from each cartoon in the site:
"https://www.sdss.org/dr18/bhm/programs/cartons#bhm_aqmes_med_plan0.5.0"
Not the center of the fileds, but the coordinates of the objects themselves.
Thanks for your attention.
Sincerely, Vítor.

[albireox]

Hi Vítor. There are a couple things you can try, but I don't have a super clear solution to the issue. As you say, one needs to install numpy first and then install sdss-target-selection. This is unfortunate but necessary because a couple of the dependencies (pymangle, mocpy) don't define numpy as a setup_requires dependency.

I'm not very familiar with installing target-selection in Windows, and I'm not 100% sure all those dependencies do work fine there. Are you using Windows directly or a WSL environment? Here are a few things you can try:

• Use WSL to install target-selection.
• Update pip, setuptools, and wheel before installing sdss-target-selection (pip install -U pip setuptools wheel).
• Try installing pymangle manually (pip install pymangle) before sdss-target-selection.
• Try Python 3.10. I can say for sure that Python 3.10 works in Linux/Mac with target-selection, but I'm less sure about 3.11. sdss-target-selection should not have problems with 3.11, but the dependencies may, and there may not be wheels for all the packages, which would require them to install from source, which can make dependency resolution harder.

But ultimately, I'm not sure that installing target-selection will help you to get the data that you need, since you'll probably also need additional infrastructure (mainly the catalog database) that are not easily available. Instead I think you want to use the already published data with DR18. You can get it from the CAS in SkyServer with a query like

SELECT * FROM mos_target t
    JOIN mos_carton_to_target c2t ON c2t.target_pk = t.target_pk
    JOIN mos_carton c ON c2t.carton_pk = c.carton_pk
    WHERE c.target_selection_planname LIKE "0.5.%"
    AND c.carton LIKE "bhm_aqmes_med"

The description of the database and tables is available here.