[Kstars-devel] Re: About packaging kstars downloadable data

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Noel and Jeamy,

I'm sorry I delayed this so badly.

I retrieved the old mail that Jason sent me regarding the Tycho-2
catalog. I'm pasting that here:

--------------
Hello,

The Hipparcos and Tycho catalog is available from NASA here:
http://adc.astro.umd.edu/adc-cgi/cat.pl?/catalogs/1/1239/

It's also available from the CDS in France, but they have an ambiguous
usage policy for data.  NASA's is much clearer:
http://adc.astro.umd.edu/adc/questions_feedback.html#policies

Anyway, we want the Tycho catalog, which is split into 20 files with
53000 records each (slightly less for the last file), for a total of
about 1 million stars.

Akarsh, if you want, I can parse these catalogs to extract only the
fields we will need, and send you the parsed version.  Or you can do
it if you're interested.

regards,
Jason
--------------

However, I'm unable to open that link presently. I guess they've moved
here:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/#archivestat

And this is the Tycho-2 page:
http://heasarc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/tycho2.html

But I couldn't find any details about their copyright policy etc,
except this:
http://heasarc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/distrib/

This doesn't seem to say anything about the usage of the catalog as a
whole by a software, though.

They say that we could ask them for any further info about the
catalog, and I've sent a mail, asking for the license policy.

Thanks for bringing this up. It's better to get this stuff straight!

Regards
Akarsh