RE: A Data Reduction Proposal

[Chris Albertson <chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com>]

I think the way to do this and things like it is by reference.
For example
if we know "TASS-123456" is the same star as "UCAC-654321"
and if proper motion is in UCAC then we've got it if we
have imported UCAC to our system.  Same for
things like spectra.  If we do an ID match to some catalog
of stellar spectra then someone could do a search of the TASS
data by some property of the spectra.  The owners of these
other catalogs can then publish revisions and we don't need to
do a massive data copy.  The DBMS software can hide all this
from most users  I think our data would be most useful if we
could cross ID it with just about everything under the sun
Yes, I know, it's not easy in crowded fields, one more project
for someone to work on.

I wrote a little program a while back to import any FITS
table to a Postgresql DBMS.  It imported Tycho, Hiparcos (sp???)
and the ADC CD-ROMS all "hands off".  So getting all this catalog
dat into the DBMS is easy.  Matching is harder but a simple
"closest star" mostly works and is easy to automate


--- aah@nofs.navy.mil wrote:
> One thing to keep in mind, for a database that is going to
> last some number of years, is that you need to include fields
> for proper motion.  For TASS, all of the stars will be present
> in the final UCAC catalog, which will include proper motion,
> so we don't have to calculate p.m., but there are quite a few
> stars that move perceptibly in short order.  I'm having to
> revise my internal database to account for this, especially
> with some of the Landolt standards like GD71.
> Arne
> 


=====
Chris Albertson 
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson@aero.org

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