VizieR

CDS is experiencing a cybersecurity incident within its network of servers located in Strasbourg. Our teams are taking steps to assess and mitigate the issue. This includes taking some systems offline to help protect them. As a consequence, access to SIMBAD, VizieR, Aladin image surveys, X-Match and other services hosted on our main site cds.unistra.fr is currently degraded.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause. Our teams are doing their best to investigate the incident, and restore full access to the services located in Strasbourg as soon as possible.

This page provides some alternatives for accessing VizieR services in the meantime.

VizieR

Mirrors

Several mirrors of VizieR are available :

• at IDIA (South Africa) : https://vizier.idia.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR
• at CfA Harvard : https://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/VizieR
• at NAOJ (Japan) : http://vizier.nao.ac.jp/viz-bin/VizieR
• at China-VO : http://vizier.china-vo.org/viz-bin/VizieR

Note that the large catalogues (such as Gaia DR3 I/355) are not available on all mirrors. You can access Gaia data from the ESA archive.

astroquery.vizier

The mirror site used by astroquery.vizier can be configured either:

1. In each script:

from astroquery.vizier import Vizier
my_vizier = Vizier(vizier_server="vizier.cfa.harvard.edu")
my_vizier.find_catalogs("SDSS")

2. Permanently on you machine:

To do so, go to the file ~/.astropy/config/astroquery.cfg and edit the [vizier] section. There should be a commented line:

#vizier_server = vizier.cds.unistra.fr

Replace by:

vizier_server = vizier.cfa.harvard.edu

Troubleshooting: if the file is not there, you might have changed the default location for astropy configuration files. You can find yours with:

from astropy.config import get_config_dir_path
print(get_config_dir_path())

Other services

You will find fallback information for other CDS services on this page.