The CDS Sesame server is a very good feature to directly get useful information on various objects based on their names from the command-line.

Fortunately access to the server is very easy through HTTP-GET (as described in the page above), and there is even a small script as part of the client package to automate the job. The actual shell script (that was kindly provided by its author: Francois Ochsenbein) is attached. For example with this script you can run the command below to get basic information about m51.

./sesame m51

We can use this script as a model to easily implement access to the Sesame servers in 'astquery', for example the command below.

astquery --sesame=m51

We can also add options like '--sesame-resolver' and '--sesame-server' to specify different resolvers/servers. The final XML schema can be written to a file (optionally, if '--output' is given) and a more easy to read format can be used to print the information on the standard output. These "extra"s are just a brainstorm now, until they are implemented, so please share your thoughts here (you just need to have an account on Savannah to comment).