PMM - USNO and Third Party Software

USNOFS Catalogue and Image Archive

This service will extract parts of USNO-B1.0, USNO-A2.0 and/or ACT. It provides lists of objects in the catalogue(s), star charts of the region requested, and digitized Schmidt plate images of the region.

ESO Science Archive Group

The ESO Science Archive group has now announced and released a server for the USNO-A2.0 catalogue. The catalogue is kept on-line on a dedicated hard disk. The server called behind the scenes is a C-program written at ESO. This program does not use the index files provided by the USNO but uses a single index file instead, which has been produced at ESO. This index file contains all information needed to access the complete catalogue in chunks of 50.000 objects or less. The USNO index in contrary is built up as a set of files (one for each data file) and they have a fixed spacing in RA of 0.25 h. The number of stars in a chunk of 0.25 h x 7.5 deg might be rather high at low galactic latitudes and thus the access in those regions might take a long time just to retrieve some stars. This was the main reason for us to produce a new index file. The same server is also included in the default configuration file for the ESO Skycat tool. [Submitted by Andreas Wicenec.]

Arne Henden (USNO Flagstaff Station)

Here is a simple Fortran program that will search the catalog and generate a list of objects within a specified region. While useful as-is on the PC, it is easily modifiable if someone wants additional features. Both source code and executable code are provided.

Bruce Koehn (Lowell Observatory)

has developed catalog access software, and can provide source (FORTRAN) and executables (Solaris, MS-DOS).

Doug Mink (SAO/CfA)

has developed catalog access software, which is described here.

Eric Deutsch (U. Washingon)

has ported demo.tar (from the USNO-A1.0 CD-ROM) to a Sun platform, and has fixed bugs and made other improvements.

SIMBAD (CDS)

now includes a search engine for the USNO-A1.0.