The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Esa Gaia listing page.
ESA Gaia DR3 — positions, parallaxes (hence distances), proper motions, photometry and astrophysical parameters for 1.8 billion stars, queried over the ESA archive's TAP service.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.
gaia_cone_search(ra, dec, radius_arcmin?, max_magnitude?, min_parallax_mas?, limit?) —
every star inside a radius of a sky position, nearest first, with distances
derived from parallax.gaia_source_by_id(source_id) — one star's full astrometric and photometric record.gaia_adql_query(query, limit?) — an arbitrary read-only ADQL SELECT against the
archive, row-capped at 2,000.Keyless — the synchronous TAP endpoint needs no account.
FORMAT=json.
Main table gaiadr3.gaia_source.<INFO> element
carrying the error, so a naive caller books a failure as an empty result. A
JSON body with no data array is therefore treated as an error and the
<INFO> text surfaced.1000/parallax is a distance in parsecs only when the parallax is
positive and well determined, so distance_pc is null — with a
distance_note saying why — for a negative parallax or a signal-to-noise
below 5. Inverting it anyway produces a confident-looking number that means
nothing.source_id is a 64-bit integer. JSON.parse has already lost precision
above 2^53 by the time the body is parsed, so ids are re-rendered as strings
on the way out and accepted as strings on the way in.source_id values are release-specific — a DR2 id does not resolve in DR3.TOP silently, so the cap is applied here explicitly rather than
trusted to the server.radius_arcmin defaults to 3 and is capped at 60 for that reason.Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/esa-gaia/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/gaia_cone_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.
This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:
Or run it directly to confirm it starts:
It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call
for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT