Hi Lawrence,

"Being unfamiliar with B1.0 stars or what they actually mean..."

Some discussion of this is at

http://www.projectpluto.com/datasets.htm#b1

and I should add more, about B1.0 and other large star catalogs
(UCAC-2, CMC-14, GSC-2.2, 2MASS, and so on).

Short description: USNO-B1.0 is a star catalog with about a billion
stars (compare to half a billion for its predecessor, USNO-A2.0, and
about 15 million for GSC.) GSC was based on scanning in photographic
plates of various parts of the sky. A2.0 did the same thing, except
with pairs of plates, one red and one blue. That gives you some (very
rough) color data, and meant that spurious objects could be dropped:
if an "object" appeared on only one plate, it was dropped as being most
likely a plate flaw or asteroid or something else "wrong".

B1.0 did the same thing, except with _five_ sets of plates: two
red plates, two blue plates, and an infrared plate. So for each star
in B1.0, you may get five magnitudes. That also gave better ability to
tell false objects from real ones.

As you go up the ladder from GSC to A2.0 to B1.0, you get more
stars, somewhat more accurate positions, and better magnitudes (though
not by much).

-- Bill