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

[James Bowlin]

On Mon June 30 2008, Jason Harris wrote:
> 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).

Yipee!

> 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.

Let's go crazy!  But only after we have 100e6 stars working.  Also, I 
don't think we should tell people we have 1e9 stars available until we
actually have it working.

-- 
Peace, James