Andrea, you're right about the confusion you can get when
you've got GSC-2.2, A2.0, and B1.0 all covering a given area. In
a perfect world, the catalogues would be automatically matched
and you would see one "star" instead of three; clicking for "more
info" would get you the details from all three catalogues (or one
or two, if the star didn't appear in all three).

This is by no means a hopeless dream. Your average citizen
may download a few hundred thousand stars at a whack; merging
them isn't an impossible task. But at the moment, about all
you can do is to go into "Extras... Toggle User-Added Datasets"
and turn off two of the three datasets. (Or at least turn off
the _labels_ from two of the three datasets.)

Pat, about distribution of B1.0: I made inquiry of David
Monet (head honcho of B1.0) on this subject. He questioned the
usefulness and practicality of doing so. On the practical side,
it _is_ an 80-GByte dataset; it currently is "distributed",
to assorted servers, on a Linux-formatted hard drive. It's
already in binary form; it could probably be compressed (rough
estimate) about 2:1, which _still_ leaves a big dataset.

Of course, in a year or two, it may be just as practical to
distribute B1.0 on nine DVD-Rs as it currently is to distribute
A2.0 on eleven CD-ROMs. If that happens, we may revisit the
whole issue.

For "usefulness", he pointed out that the data will be readily
available via Internet, is already available from two sites, and
soon may be available from others. True, a lot of software is
currently not set up to make good use of these, but it will be.
(Including Guide, as soon as I find a way to do it!)

Jeff wrote:

"...It is unclear to me from the zone query tools whether
B1 would be useful to me or not."

It ought to be better than A2.0, inasmuch as its random
errors appear to be less (due to the use of "current" plates
in B1.0, instead of the circa-1950s plates used for A2.0).

-- Bill