Re: USNO on your hard disk

Bob Elliott Jan 26, 2001

At 07:01 2001-01-26 -0600, Rolf wrote:
>Hello
>
>I am using Guide7. I got the USNO catalog. .........
>How can I get rid of the data (like in RealSky) or will it
>take some months and 11 CDs are on my hard-disk?

Hello Rolf.

If you have room on your hard disk and are into imaging why not load the 11
disks on your HD. It takes about 9 GB of space, but then you have a
wonderful star catalog any time you want it. You can set the magnitude
where you want the USNO to show up and all of the stars are plotted in color.

See Bill Gray's instructions below:

Bob Elliott
750 Fall Creek


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(21 December 1999) Ability to use all of the A1.0 or A2.0 data on the hard
drive: Guide has long supported use of the A1.0 and A2.0 datasets, by
letting you either extract a part of the data from the ten or eleven-CD-ROM
sets or by storing a
downloaded portion on your hard drive.

Recent increases in hard drive capacity have caused some people to copy
some or all of the entire A1.0 or A2.0 over to hard drive, consuming up to
about 6 GBytes. If you do this, you can now tell Guide to display such data
by adding a line such as the following to GUIDE.DAT:

A2_PATH=14.3;f:\a20;g:\;h:

In the above example, Guide will display of A2.0 data if the limiting star
magnitude is past 14.3. At that point, it will check the directory F:\A20
for A2.0 files; if it can't find them there, it will check the root
directories of G: and H:.

A1.0 users, logically enough, would use the above, with 'A1_PATH' in place
of 'A2_PATH'.

Both A1.0 and A2.0 are provided in 24 files, each covering a 7.5 degree
band in declination. If Guide cannot find some of these files, it accepts
that fact and simply shows no Ax.0 data. This can permit a person such as
myself, at latitude +45, to mit the six zones covering declinations -45 to
-90, areas forever hidden from here. A warning, though: as the A2.0 disk
organization and A1.0 disk organization pages make clear, leaving those six
zones out only saves about 500 MBytes.