Re: [guide-user] Dataset cleanup

Bill J Gray Feb 4, 2005

Hi Ben,

Odd you should mention this... I've recently been swapping a few
private e-mails about the possibility of making a uniform system
for reporting errata in astronomical datasets. People are finding
errors at an astonishing rate, but there's no system for folding
the corrections back into catalogs.

This is, incidentally, a Big Picture problem, not really a
Guide one. It's too big (and too important) to be left to individual
software authors. There needs to be a way to log corrections in a
form where anyone who wants to can make use of them... but I'll
spare you the full soapbox speech!

At present, there would be exactly one way to get rid of
spurious B1.0 stars. Edit the file 'b10.dat' in a text editor,
look for the line(s) in question, and delete them. Similarly,
one can delete downloaded A2.0, UCAC2, GSC-2.2, and 2MASS
stars by deleting lines in the files 'eso_a2.dat', 'u2.dat',
'gsc22.dat', and '2mass.dat'.

Note that this is a graceless way of doing things. The edits
you make represent valuable work; we ought to be accumulating them
so everyone can benefit from them. But at least right now, that's
not the way it works.

-- Bill