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Old May 17th 17, 05:27 AM posted to sci.astro.research
Eric Flesch
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Posts: 321
Default All-Sky Optical catalogue now available for download

My publications are coming to an end, methinks, but throughout I was
using a homegrown version of an all-sky optical catalogue, the likes
of which seem strangely missing from availability nowadays. Once upon
a time the USNO-B was distributed in Linux, so it was said -- no
evidence of that today, and you can't download the USNO-B today. In
the late 1990's the USNO-A was distributed on 10-12 CDs in a limited
edition -- I've still got mine, but it's vanished elsewhere. And the
APM was "distributed" on tape -- how old does that sound -- but
occasionally parts of it would pop up on web sites -- and I said
"pretty please" to AAO to put some of it on theirs -- and so I got the
whole thing 16 years ago. Today we have SDSS and SuperCosmos which
are terabytes large -- good luck with that.

So I detected a need, and have built an all-sky optical catalogue from
USNO-B, USNO-A, APM and SDSS optical data, it is 1.16 billion objects
in a sparse format which is stored at a mere 9Gb. It's been accepted
by PASA and is now on arXiv at

https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05434

So if you would like to have your very own all-sky optical catalogue
on your own computer, you can now have one. Hope you like it. As for
me, I think I'm done now but you never know for sure. It seems likely
that I'll be issuing a new Milliquas ("million quasars") catalogue on
NASA HEASARC in July when SDSS DR14 comes out, so I may be around for
a while yet.

cheers,
Eric Flesch
Whakatane, New Zealand
17-May-17