Message from Bill Gray

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Bill Gray sent this message to the list which bounced as he does not seem 
to be on the list or sent the message from some other address than that 
from which he is subscribed.  I am just sending it to the list to save the 
fuss of corresponding with Bill.

Tom Droege

A follow-up to Patrick Wils' Perl modules to extract
GSC-ACT, Tycho-2, and Hipparcos data from the Guide
CD-ROMs: if you aren't a Guide user, you can still get
the datasets (except for Hipparcos) on CDs, in ASCII
format. I've been making GSC-ACT available on two CDs,
in essentially the same form the Astronomical Society
of the Pacific used to, at the cost of production:

http://www.projectpluto.com/gsc_act2.htm

"Cost of production" = $5 in the US and Canada,
$7 elsewhere (includes shipping). Several other datasets,
some possibly of interest to those on this list, are
provided in the remaining space on the CDs; details
are given at the above URL.

When I last checked, Tycho-2 was being provided on
CD-ROM at no charge by USNO and ESA. Their CDs include
certain fields (some uncertainty data and correlation
matrices) absent in the Guide data. But the Guide data
includes some additional identifications and the parallax
data from Tycho-1.

-- Bill