[Kstars-devel] USNO is sending me 100 million stars

[Jan Kotek]

Any chance of supporting USNO A 2.0 binary format? 

It have quite simple format 6byte record per star, is also indexed.
There are some C libraries for reading it. Many amateurs already have
downloaded it since CdC and other programs can read it. 

It have 5e8 stars in ~ 6 GB. Quality is not great but can do the job.
Can be downloaded from here:
ftp://dbc.nao.ac.jp/DBC/NASAADC/catalogs/1/1252/

Jan Kotek



On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 10:19 -0700, Jason Harris wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I heard back from Norbert Zacharias at USNO.  He's going to send me a  
> subset of the NOMAD composite catalog using the criteria:
> 
> (is a 2MASS star) AND ( V <= 16.5 OR R <= 16.0 OR B <= 16.0)
> 
> which he thinks will yield ~100 million stars (FYI, 2MASS is an all- 
> sky near-infrared survey).
> 
> The data will be shipped to me on a few DVDs.  I'll then process them  
> (assigning HD numbers and star names), zip it up, and make it  
> available to Akarsh.
> 
> If we eventually go completely insane and decide we want to do the  
> entire 1 billion stars, I'll have to send Norbert a portable hard  
> drive to hold the data.  Akarsh and I were talking about this  
> possibility on IRC...IMO, it makes sense to tell people that this  
> option is available if they are really interested, but distributing  
> the data online is problematic.  Even compressed into Akarsh's binary  
> format, the data will take up about 30 GB.  Who knows, in a year or  
> two that might not be a big deal anymore.
> 
> regards,
> Jason
> 
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