How do I get a list of column names from a psycopg2 cursor?

From "Programming Python" by Mark Lutz:

curs.execute("Select * FROM people LIMIT 0")
colnames = [desc[0] for desc in curs.description]

Another thing you can do is to create a cursor with which you will be able to reference your columns by their names (that's a need which led me to this page in the first place):

import psycopg2
from psycopg2.extras import RealDictCursor

ps_conn = psycopg2.connect(...)
ps_cursor = psql_conn.cursor(cursor_factory=RealDictCursor)

ps_cursor.execute('select 1 as col_a, 2 as col_b')
my_record = ps_cursor.fetchone()
print (my_record['col_a'],my_record['col_b'])

>> 1, 2