Bill J Gray wrote:

> However, when told that the precision of some parts of Guide
> was more than most people would ever need, I made a comment about
> how "one can never be too rich,

Actually one can be too rich: when you get really rich, you'll get a
steady stream of letters from people begging money from you for a
variety of reasons. You'll also probably want to invest your
money in the best possible way, and always reconsider your investments.
That eats your time. But worst of all, you're more likely to become a
target of criminals who e.g. by cidnapping your kids try to squeeze
money from you. At some point, money becomes more trouble than
pleasure -- when you've reached that point, you've become too rich.

There are some psychologists on the US who've specialized in the
problems of the very rich, i.e. those who never ever will have to
work for their living but sit day after day in their mansions, by
their private pools, having a life that's quite empty and boring....

> too thin,

Look up "anorexia" in your encyclopedia... :-)

> or have too much accuracy in one's astronomy software."

That's not true either. Higher accuracy usually means slower
computations. Consider for instance if you want to compute a
table of sun/moon-rises and -sets during one year for your
location. Computing and iterating the Sun's and the Moon's
position to milliarcsecond accuracy, just to at the very end
round off your result to the nearest 1/4 degree (yep, that's
almost one million milli-arcseconds) seem quite pointless
and will only tremendeously slow down the computation. If you
instead use just the right level of accuracy, such a table can
be computed in a fraction of a second on a modern PC.

And even something like computing Besselian elements for the
occultations of some year can be speeded up considerably by
doing most of the iterations with a lower-accuracy but faster
routine for the Moon's position, and then at the end do a few
final iterations with the slow but high-accucary routine for
the Moon's position.

> To which many would add:
> "Or have too much data for your astronomy software to play with."

Again, that's a matter of your resources: how large are your
storage media? And how much of it are you willing to use for
this additional star data?

> If USNO-B1.0 can be made available in a practical manner, few of
> us will say, "Thanks, but I've got enough data."

That's a matter of what you want to do. Having it available at the
Internet is of course great -- then you can access whatever subset
you may need. But devoting some 60-70 GBytes of your harddisk to
this catalog just because "it may be good to have", that's more
doubtful. Perhaps it could be shrunk to 5 or 10 GBytes ???? Or
else we may just wait a few years, until Terabyte harddisk are
common....

--
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