"new" objects are just ordinary stars ...

[Stupendous Man <richmond@a188-l009.rit.edu>]

  I've checked the objects Chris mentioned in a message earlier this
week: he found 13 objects in the TASS scans which did not appear in the
USNO catalog.  

  I looked at the Digitized Palomar Sky Survey via Skyview

          http://skview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/skvadvanced.pl

at the position of each object, and found that each one matches
a star in the plates.  Each star is also in the Hubble Guide Star
Catalog.  Specifically,

        Chris object ID         GSC ID            star mag
        --------------------------------------------------------
         10003825              0002_00649         10    (double?) 
         10006686              0002_01141         11.3
         10006736              0003_00509          9.8
         10006856              0003_00708         11.2
         10006898              0003_00579         10.8
         10153905              5242_00466
         10154628              5242_01077         11.9
         10155146              5242_00530         10.5
         10162983              5251_00790         11.2
         10171104              0587_00592         10.5
         10171200              5253_00394         11.4
         10171277              0587_00461         10.5
         10171878              5253_00249         10.2 (close double)

  Some of these stars were bright enough to have diffraction spikes and
a halo in the photographic image; others weren't.  I saw no common
feature to them.

  I don't know why these objects didn't appear in the "tassm16" list.
If I look at the full USNO A1.0 catalog, I find some.  For example,
the second object above (the "moving" one) has this entry:

>    RA            Decl.           Mag.      Radius     Angle
>  hr mn sec     dec mn sec      Red  Blue    arcsec      deg
>  
>  00 19 52.577  +01 08 57.01   11.7   0.0m     2.7      222.9


  The TASS position quoted by Chris was usually about 3 arcsec north of
the GSC position; since only a few scans were combined in his analysis,
this isn't too bad.

  I looked at the special case of the "moving object".  This corresponds
to the position of a fixed star.  It's possible that an asteroid might have
been moving past the star on the nights in question, since this area is
right in the middle of the ecliptic.  I guess we just won't know.  
It's also possible that he picked a star with small random variations
in position which just happened to increase in RA for the first 5 out of
6 detections.

  Now, I don't want to discourage anyone.  It looks to me like these
particular objects aren't "new"; they're just missing from a catalog
against which we matched.  But Chris' exercise shows how easy it is
to look for and find _something_ of interest -- now we can ask,
"why are these stars missing from the tassm16 catalog?", and that
may itself lead to some interesting results.  

  By the way, the "JD" reported in Chris' E-mail message is the encoded
value from the database.  The real RA is

               real RA = [ (database RA)/1,000,000 ]  + 2,540,000

So the first entry, "JD" = 696720180, corresponds to a true
Julian Date of 2450696.72, or Sep 5, 1997 UT 5:16:48.  The next two
entries are at intervals of about 0.04 days = about 1 hour.

  I have placed the new version of Chris' DBMS code onto the TASS home
page's "software" site.  

  The quarter has ended here at RIT.  I am now almost free to work on TASS
stuff.  Rah rah!

                                      Michael Richmond