query tables based on a query

I have a large number of tables with a common naming convention

basically:

table001, table002, table003 ... table00n

I would like to do a query across all of the tables, however I do not know
all of the tables before hand, and I do not want to manually generate a
query like

select * from table001, table002, table003

I have a query that returns the names of the tables I want to query, it is
basically like this:

select tablename from pg_tables where tablename like 'table%'

How do I do this? I've tried creating a Table Function that returns the
above set and tried to use that in a select clause, but I cant get it to
work either.

Thanks for the help