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

[Jason Harris]

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