Re: Newbie: observation request? (really DIFCAL)

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

  Paul asked:

> I have a copy of DIFCAL2.ZIP that I want to load into a database. Is there
> a set of definitions of the data columns anywhere?

  If you look at the TASS "Software" page, you will see a section
labelled "Henden's Collate program for matching lists of stars".
Arne Henden several FORTRAN programs to process the raw star lists
derived from Mark III images.  There are links to each of the
programs.  In "difcal.f4", I see the lines:

     write (3,900) i,ra(i),dec(i),hjd(i),ave1,ave2,sig1,
   $       sig2,nc,fname(1:12)

which leads me to believe that the DIFCAL2 output might be

     col 1       index of star
     col 2       Right Ascension
     col 3       Declination
     col 4       Heliocentric Julian Date
     col 5       Average V-band magnitude
     col 6       Average I-band magnitude
     col 7       Standard deviation from mean V-band magnitude
     col 8       Standard deviation from mean I-band magnitude
     col 9       Number of observations (in each passband?)
     col 10      Name of raw star list containing data for this star

  Arne Henden is the author, so I hope he'll correct me if I'm
wrong here.

                                                  Michael Richmond