Developer Tools

.Astronomy Archive API

v1.0 Read-only JSON. Free. No auth required.

Machine-readable access to every .Astronomy event, talk, and hack since 2008. Built for developers, researchers, bots, and LLMs. Served as static JSON from GitHub Pages -- open CORS, no rate limits, CC BY 4.0.

// base url

Base URL

https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1

All endpoints return JSON. GitHub Pages sets Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * by default, so you can fetch from any browser, script, or tool without a proxy.

// endpoints

Endpoints

GET/events.json

List all 14 .Astronomy events with summary data: name, year, city, venue, dates, talk count, hack count.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/events.json

Example response

{"events":[{"slug":"one","number":"1","name":".Astronomy 1","year":2008,"city":"Cardiff","country":"United Kingdom","dates":"22-24 September 2008","talk_count":13,"hack_count":0},...],"total":14}

GET/events/{slug}.json

Full data for a single event: all organisers, talks, hacks, and links. Slugs: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, alpha, twelve, thirteen.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/events/eight.json

GET/hacks.json

All hacks from all events -- title, creators, description, source URLs, and which event they came from. 80 hacks across 14 events.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/hacks.json

filter by event (jq)

curl -s https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/hacks.json \
  | jq '.hacks[] | select(.event == "eight")'

GET/talks.json

All talks from all events -- speaker, affiliation, title, talk type (invited, contributed, lightning, day zero). 202 talks.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/talks.json

search by speaker (jq)

curl -s https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/talks.json \
  | jq '.talks[] | select(.speaker | test("Kendrew"; "i"))'

GET/people.json

Everyone who has attended a .Astronomy conference, with their event history, roles, Bluesky handles, and affiliations. 404 people.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/people.json

GET/index.json

API root: endpoint index, version, licence, and generation timestamp. Good starting point for discovery.

curl

curl https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/index.json

// for llms and ai agents

For LLMs and AI Agents

The .Astronomy API is designed to be easy to consume programmatically. Here are suggested prompts and patterns:

Python

import requests

# Get all events
events = requests.get(
    "https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/events.json"
).json()["events"]

# Get full data for .Astronomy 8
dotastro8 = requests.get(
    "https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/events/eight.json"
).json()

# Search hacks by keyword
hacks = requests.get(
    "https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/hacks.json"
).json()["hacks"]
sonification_hacks = [h for h in hacks if "sonif" in h.get("description","").lower()]

Suggested prompts for LLMs

"Fetch https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/events.json
 and summarise how the conference has evolved since 2008."

"Using the .Astronomy API at https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1,
 find all hacks that involved machine learning or AI."

"From https://dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite/api/v1/people.json,
 find everyone who attended more than 5 events."

The API returns plain JSON with no authentication, pagination tokens, or rate limits. All data is suitable for training, research, and analysis under CC BY 4.0.

// licence

Licence

All data in the .Astronomy Archive API is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to use, share, and build on this data for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you credit the .Astronomy Archive.

Suggested attribution: ".Astronomy Archive, dotastro.github.io/dotastrosite, CC BY 4.0"

The archive itself is open source: github.com/dotastro/dotastrosite. Contributions and corrections welcome.