[Kstars-devel] More star catalog issues

[Andrew Buck]

Okay so I went to Wikipedia and found the page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NGC_objects_%281-999%29 wchich as
the name implies has data one the first 999 NGC objects.  I copy/pasted
the text from the tables into a file and with a bit of massaging via
some sed commands and a bit of manual tweaking for the wierd stuff I
came up with a list of Number, RA, DEC, and MAG for the objects.  I will
make that file, and the scripts, etc, available via my webserver at
http://andrewbuck.homelinux.org/NGC   The finished product is called
"List of NGC objects (1-999).data".

Visual inspection of the first half dozen or so shows the magnitudes to
be different but close so automatic combining/checking might be
difficult.  This may be because the KStars database shows B Magnitude, I
think, whereas Wikipedia lists visual magnitudes.  I have recently begun
learning IRAF which is a very powerful astronomy package and it seems to
have some tools for doing exactly this but I have yet to learn to use
them.  You seem to be able to do a "diff" of two files but not just
return lines that differ by character but actually read in values and
check to see if they differ by more than a certain value.

If this data is useful to anyone I would be happy to do the remaining
NGC objects and possibly the IC objects if the page is formatted
similarly but I don't want to go to the trouble if the data cannot be
used anyway.  Also reordering the fields, etc, should be fairly
starightforward so let me know if that would help.  I will look into the
IRAF thing if I can but that could be some time, and/or I might never
figure it out.

-Buck