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| Paper: |
Guide Star Catalog Data Retrieval Software III |
| Volume: |
61, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems III |
| Page: |
183 |
| Authors: |
Malkov, O. Yu.; Smirnov, O. M. |
| Abstract: |
The Guide Star Catalogue (GSC), being the largest astronomical catalogue to date, is widely used by the astronomical community for all sorts of applications, such as statistical studies of sky regions, searches for counterparts to observational phenomena, and generation of finder charts. Its storage medium (2 CD-ROMs) requires minimum hardware and is ideally suited for all sorts of conditions, including observations. Unfortunately, the actual GSC data is not very easily accessible, due to its internal format. To facilitate its retrieval, we have created GUIDARES, a user-friendly program that lets you look directly at the data in the GSC, either as a graphical sky map, a plot, a histogram, or a simple text table. GUIDARES can read a sampling of GSC data from a given sky region, store this sampling in a text file, and display a graphical map of the sampled region either in projected celestial coordinates (perfect for finder charts) or in the Aitoff projection. It supports rectangular and circular regions defined by coordinates in the equatorial, ecliptic (any equinox), galactic or supergalactic systems. New features include magnitude cutoffs, different output formats (with or without multiple entry filtering), and the ability to make quick plots and histograms of various attributes of the data being retrieved. |
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