So, in the past two weeks, upon discussion with my mentors, I started working on the stretch goal, which involves using Astroquery’s TAP Plus for making the URL calls. Additionally, I had to clean up some code and remove the instruments SPICE and PHI from returning wavelength data due to their individual issues.
For SPICE, the `wavemin’ and `wavemax` values are only available for the first spectral window in SOAR, so the data is not entirely representative of what a user might be searching for. Similarly, for PHI, the issue is that two different units are used to represent wavelength, which results in very
different `wavemin’ and `wavemax` data due to the data being in both angstrom and nanometer units. Unfortunately, this is not specified anywhere in SOAR, so to ensure that `sunpy-soar` does not
return any misleading data to the user, we’ve decided to exclude the wavelength data for these instruments.
Coming to the change in table fetching methods. TAP Plus basically uses SQL to fetch tables, which is different from the normal TAP that uses ADQL to fetch tables. This avoids the entire process of manually constructing Astropy tables after calling the SOAR API with TAP.
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