Guide catalogs from Perl

[Patrick Wils <patrickwils@yahoo.com>]

For bulk searches, it may be cumbersome to use the online access to
Simbad or VizieR to get catalog information.  The catalogs provided by
Guide (in a compressed form) may be convenient in that case.  I have
written some Perl modules to retrieve the data without the need to
(compile and) run the decompression programs provided by Guide, and
without the need to save the decompressed files.
Guide uses a number of different compression schemes, I have only
included modules for the most important catalogs, among which are GSC,
Tycho and Hipparcos.
Unzip the program files to a subdirectory called "Guide" of one of the
directories in Perl's @INC path.  Documentation (pod) for the use of
the modules is in the files themselves.

Patrick



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Guide.zip