🌌 ESA Gaia DR3 Star Catalog Scraper

🚀 Pull real stellar measurements from the ESA Gaia DR3 archive in one run. Query by ADQL or a simple cone search and get back source IDs, sky positions, parallax, proper motion, photometry, radial velocity, and effective temperature for every star.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 11 fields per record · billions of sources in Gaia DR3 · full-sky coverage

The ESA Gaia mission has measured the positions, distances, and motions of nearly two billion stars. The Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) catalog is the richest map of the Milky Way ever assembled. This Actor talks to the official Gaia Archive TAP service and turns that catalog into clean, structured records you can drop straight into a notebook, a database, or a dashboard.

You can run an exact ADQL query against the gaiadr3.gaia_source table, or skip the query language entirely and search a circular patch of sky by right ascension, declination, and radius. Either way you get the same well-typed records back.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Astronomers and astrophysics researchers	Building target lists for observing runs
Data scientists and ML practitioners	Training and testing stellar classification models
Educators and students	Teaching astrometry, parallax, and photometry
Science communicators and hobbyists	Mapping local stellar neighborhoods

📋 What the Gaia DR3 Star Catalog Scraper does

This Actor queries the ESA Gaia DR3 archive and returns one record per stellar source. For each source it collects the unique Gaia source identifier, right ascension and declination, trigonometric parallax, proper motion in RA and Dec, mean magnitudes in the G, BP, and RP photometric bands, radial velocity, and the GSP-Phot effective temperature. You control the selection with either a full ADQL query or a cone search.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
adqlQuery	string	No	A full ADQL query against gaiadr3.gaia_source. Overrides the cone search when set.
ra	integer	No	Cone center right ascension in degrees (0 to 360).
dec	integer	No	Cone center declination in degrees (-90 to 90).
radius	string	No	Cone radius in degrees, for example 0.1.
maxItems	integer	No	Maximum records to return. Free plan is capped at 10.

Example 1 — cone search around a patch of sky

{
    "ra": 45,
    "dec": 0,
    "radius": "0.1",
    "maxItems": 50
}

Example 2 — custom ADQL query

{
    "adqlQuery": "SELECT TOP 20 source_id, ra, dec, parallax, pmra, pmdec, phot_g_mean_mag, phot_bp_mean_mag, phot_rp_mean_mag, radial_velocity, teff_gspphot FROM gaiadr3.gaia_source WHERE parallax IS NOT NULL",
    "maxItems": 20
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the Gaia Archive synchronous service caps each query at roughly 2000 rows, so keep cone radii small and use TOP in custom queries. Radial velocity and effective temperature are only measured for a subset of brighter, well-characterized stars, so those two fields are often null for faint sources. That is expected, not a bug.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🆔 sourceId	string	Unique Gaia DR3 source identifier (kept as a string to preserve full 64-bit precision).
📐 ra	number	Right ascension in degrees.
📐 dec	number	Declination in degrees.
📏 parallax	number	Trigonometric parallax in milliarcseconds.
➡️ pmra	number	Proper motion in right ascension (mas/yr).
⬆️ pmdec	number	Proper motion in declination (mas/yr).
✨ photGMeanMag	number	Mean magnitude in the Gaia G band.
🔵 photBpMeanMag	number	Integrated BP mean magnitude.
🔴 photRpMeanMag	number	Integrated RP mean magnitude.
🌀 radialVelocity	number	Radial velocity in km/s (null when not measured).
🌡 teff	number	GSP-Phot effective temperature in Kelvin (null when not measured).
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of when the record was collected.
❌ error	string	Error message, null on successful records.

Real sample records

{
    "sourceId": "5188146087831728384",
    "ra": 44.96061355952784,
    "dec": -0.06385449994739745,
    "parallax": 0.5875496627769571,
    "pmra": 7.72780001640072,
    "pmdec": -2.850661973997159,
    "photGMeanMag": 15.877191,
    "photBpMeanMag": 16.23885,
    "photRpMeanMag": 15.346017,
    "radialVelocity": null,
    "teff": 5591.2266,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T16:12:16.388Z",
    "error": null
}

{
    "sourceId": "5188146117896344448",
    "ra": 44.965924658616835,
    "dec": -0.05586715308853149,
    "parallax": 0.06527682229940536,
    "pmra": 13.307380697609029,
    "pmdec": 5.73381569742609,
    "photGMeanMag": 20.262077,
    "photBpMeanMag": 21.602179,
    "photRpMeanMag": 18.898542,
    "radialVelocity": null,
    "teff": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T16:12:16.447Z",
    "error": null
}

{
    "sourceId": "5188146568868064768",
    "ra": 44.961407043733274,
    "dec": -0.03320965054177338,
    "parallax": 0.43504893366604697,
    "pmra": 7.574971584312527,
    "pmdec": -13.324429895509663,
    "photGMeanMag": 17.123215,
    "photBpMeanMag": 17.582111,
    "photRpMeanMag": 16.49985,
    "radialVelocity": null,
    "teff": 4810.333,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T16:12:16.469Z",
    "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Talks directly to the official ESA Gaia Archive TAP service, so the data is authoritative and current with DR3.
• Accepts both ADQL power queries and plain cone searches, so beginners and experts are both covered.
• Preserves the full 64-bit source_id as a string, so identifiers never get mangled by numeric rounding.
• Returns clean, consistently typed fields ready for analysis.
• No API key required.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	This Actor	Manual TAP queries	Bulk catalog downloads
Setup	None, just fill the form	Write ADQL and parse VOTable yourself	Download and process huge files
ADQL support	Yes	Yes	No
Cone search helper	Yes	Build it yourself	No
Structured records	Yes	Manual parsing	Manual parsing
ID precision safe	Yes	Depends on parser	Depends on parser

🚀 How to use

1. Sign up for a free Apify account using this link.
2. Open the Gaia DR3 Star Catalog Scraper.
3. Either enter a cone search (RA, Dec, radius) or paste a full ADQL query.
4. Set how many records you want and start the run.
5. Collect your structured stellar records when the run finishes.

💼 Business use cases

Research data pipelines

Need	How this helps
Reproducible queries	Save query inputs and rerun anytime
Clean inputs for analysis	Receive typed records instead of raw VOTable

Education and outreach

Need	How this helps
Classroom datasets	Pull a small patch of sky for exercises
Live demonstrations	Show parallax and proper motion on real stars

Machine learning

Need	How this helps
Training data	Build labeled stellar samples by region
Feature engineering	Combine photometry, motion, and temperature

Planetarium and visualization

Need	How this helps
Star map building	Fetch positions and magnitudes for a sky region
Color rendering	Use BP and RP magnitudes for star colors

🔌 Automating Gaia DR3 Star Catalog Scraper

Connect runs to Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, or Google Drive through Apify integrations and webhooks. Trigger a query on a schedule, then route the structured records into your warehouse, a spreadsheet, or a notification channel automatically.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: assemble custom stellar samples for a paper or thesis.
• Personal: explore the stars in your favorite constellation.
• Non-profit: power free planetarium and outreach tools.
• Experimentation: prototype astrometry and photometry ideas quickly.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant

Paste your records into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot and ask it to summarize the stellar population, estimate distances from parallax, or sort sources by temperature.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need a Gaia or ESA account or API key? No. The Gaia Archive TAP service used here is open and keyless.

Q: Which catalog does this query? Gaia Data Release 3, table gaiadr3.gaia_source.

Q: Can I write my own query? Yes. Provide a full ADQL query and it runs as written. The cone search is only used when no query is given.

Q: Why are radial velocity and temperature sometimes null? Those measurements only exist for a subset of brighter, well-characterized stars in DR3. Faint sources legitimately have no value.

Q: Why is the source ID a string and not a number? Gaia source IDs are 64-bit integers that exceed the safe range of standard numbers, so they are kept as strings to avoid rounding.

Q: How many records can I get per run? The synchronous archive service caps each query near 2000 rows. Use a small radius or a TOP clause.

Q: How do I convert parallax to distance? Distance in parsecs is roughly 1000 divided by the parallax in milliarcseconds, for sources with reliable parallax.

Q: What units are used? Degrees for coordinates, milliarcseconds for parallax, mas/yr for proper motion, magnitudes for photometry, km/s for radial velocity, and Kelvin for temperature.

Q: Can I search a named star or region? Use the cone search with the RA and Dec of the region, or an ADQL query with your own constraints.

Q: Is the data live? Each run queries the archive directly, so results reflect the current DR3 catalog.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify connects to thousands of tools through its API, webhooks, and the integrations above, so your stellar records can flow into whatever system you already use.

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• ParseForge collection for more open-data and catalog scrapers.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with ESA or the Gaia mission. Only publicly available archive data is collected.