Sky Travel
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Actually, I mentioned something on this topic a few months ago… At that
time, I had just got an electronic copy of the Yale Bright Star Catalog, which
is about 2 meg of ASCII data, as I recall. (I grabbed it from the CP/M SIGM
libraries on SIMTEL20, MICRO:<SIGM.VOL031> through vol. 38., for the ARPA-heads
out there.) To save time on downloading at 1200 baud, I 'compress'd the files,
but screwed up the compression bit size, so now I can't 'uncompress' without an
8 meg machine. So, no star data for me, or the Amiga. So, any ARPANETter care
to download this data from SIMTEL20 on ARPANET, and move it to Amiga disks for
me/us? If the data conversion from ASCII to binary was done, I am sure it
would fit on one Amiga disk. The catalog lists about 9100 stars, and there are
202 characters of info per star listed: BS number, Flamsteed number, star name,
BD sign, DM number, HD number, GC number, Trig. Para. Cat. number, Radial
Velocity Cat. number, Double Star Cat. number, (among Aitken's, Rossiter's,
Innes, Finsen, Kuiper, van Biesbroeck or van den Bos), multiple star
components, Variable Star Cat. number, right ascension HMS (epoch 1900.0), sign
of ten-year change in RA, declination, +-DM, galactic longitude and latitude
+-DM, with BS-HR number, right ascension HMS (epoch 2000.0), change in RA
(2000.0 – 1900.0) +-MS, declination (epoch 2000.0) +-DM, change in decl., ("")
+-M, visual magnitude, with source (among UBV, HR Rybka V, orig. HR, or blended
image), color, spectral class, annual proper motion, (in 10^-3 arcsec), dynamic
or trig. parallax, radial velocity, double star info: number, difference,
separation, with remarks, right ascension and declination (1900.0 and 2000.0)
in radians. Nice toy indeed! Just throw in the local planets, galactic clouds,
3-d filled poly asteroids, fractal geography for unknown bodies, and a warping
starship user interface to move about, and Obi Wan, and you're all set…