Patrick, That sounds exciting. I guess we could put it on an external hard drive -- is that right? What is used to see the images? Is there a special viewer? Thanks, Joe (PS: I gather no telescope class tomorrow!) --- On Sat, 3/28/09, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote: From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] USNO-B1.0 To: "utah astronomy listserve utah astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009, 9:31 PM There is now a local source (in SLC) for the USNO-B1.0 catalog. Being that it tips the scales at about 80 GB I've put off getting it until now (I've been waiting for the price of a suitable hard drive to come down). A few days ago I found where the catalog could be downloaded from and then spoke to Bruce Grim's brother in law who does IT professionally and he agreed to download a master copy. It took 25 hours of download time but he now has it. He sold me a 500 GB drive for $85 installed and copied the catalog to it for free (transferring it to the drive took about half an hour). The transfer is free if you take him your drive. If anyone here would like a copy please let me know and I'll provide contact info. For those who may not have heard about the catalog I'll include a description below. Cheers, patrick USNO-B is an all-sky catalog that presents positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various optical passbands, and star/galaxy estimators for 1,042,618,261 objects derived from 3,643,201,733 separate observations. The data were obtained from scans of 7,435 Schmidt plates taken for the various sky surveys during the last 50 years. USNO-B1.0 is believed to provide all-sky coverage, completeness down to V = 21, 0.2 arcsecond astrometric accuracy at J2000, 0.3 magnitude photometric accuracy in up to five colors, and 85% accuracy for distinguishing stars from non-stellar objects. _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com