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Tales of Cataloguing
I was bemused to see a recent paper, 2011A&A.,529,99, Cupani G. et al,
"When two become one: an apparent QSO pair turns out to be a single quasar". The authors found that two objects in the Veron quasar catalog were in fact just one object, and provided a likely audit trail for how the error came to be. OK, it was useful for my own quasar cataloguing, but a 3 page paper for this? It is just that in the course of cleaning data for my "million quasars" catalogue, I've found & fixed maybe a hundred bloopers recorded in Veron and NED. It's just that the early quasars from the 1970's and 1980's are rife with inexactitude, to where imprecision blurs with error. But I've not considered publishing the fixes beyond recording the correct information in my catalog. An interesting topic (well, to some) is the improvements in resolution from those days to now. Back then, you espied an 18th magnitude quasar in a 1-degree tile of sky, named it e.g. "0150-535" (z=1.56) and moved on, knowing that anyone who looked later would recover it easily enough. Never mind the wag who came along later and re-discovered it with greater precision as "0147-537" (z=1.568). There are a number of such objects in the Veron catalog, annotated as having "approximate positions", which are nominally just placed in the center of such tiles of sky, because no better position is known. In the end I became pretty good at finding the right optical object for these, using the available optical, radio and X-ray data. But some puzzlements remain. There is one publication which eluded me entirely, Afanas'ev et al, 1990BSAO,32,51 presenting quasars named SA68 #110,SA68 #105,SA68 #090,SA68 #094,SA68 #143,SA68 #095,M82 #95,M82 #69,M82 #22,SA57 #216,SA57 #431. My friends, I could not find these objects at all -- as though the authors made them all up. The given co-ordinates point to nothing. I searched near and far for hours -- there was nothing. If anyone knows the whereabouts of these objects, could they contact me. I have removed them from the "million quasars" catalog until they are found. I'll resist boring you with more such stories, but I do requests. Eric Flesch |
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