Astronomy gear API??

[Victor Boesen]

I am currently undergoing research in a personal programming project of mine where I need to load telescopes of different types and brands(including focal length & diameter), eyepieces, reducers, barlows and perhaps even camera sensors. Ideally I would not want to bother adding this equipment to an API I would make myself, and I wonder if there is already an API I could make use of. I've thought about contacting astronomy tools since I would imagine they have an API that would suit my requirements, but I thought I would ask here first:)

Kind regards, Victor

[matthasboldlygone]

Not sure if you're wanting to call a 3rd party API or acquire a dataset for your own use? If you just want the data you could webscrape it off astronomy.tools (assuming it's for personal use) , it's all in the HTML source. Doesn't look like they have an API as such, just a bit of jquery and some drop downs. 

I doubt anyone would want you calling their API unless it's setup for public use. There's a project for you...

[Tenor Viol]

You'd normally only have an API available if there was an expectation of a commercial use to expose the data or e.g. a regulatory requirement as happens with banks in the UK. Unless there is a use case I can't see anyone building one on the off-chance. 

[Victor Boesen]

Thanks to both of you @matthasboldlygone and @Tenor Viol! The project is personal for now but I hope I can publish it at some point in the future(I'm making the project to satisfy my own "needs" but perhaps it could be interesting to others).

I might as well start working on my own API since it sounds like the best solution

Victor