Alrighty then, here's a temporary ucac3 from vizier for Guide 8 thingy until Bill has chance to do a grown up and more sophisticated one, because it is quite a busy dataset, with lots of flags and all that.

This will give you positions, errors on positions, proper of the motions, errors thereupon, and ucac3 "model fit" ucac3 mags as well as 2mass J and Ks mags and errors thereon, and maybe something else, I forget already.

I haven't bothered with any flags, ones such as those for doubles will only crop up rarely, and I'm fairly sure most of the astrometry software ignores various flags, especially the photometric ones, so why shouldn't a charting proggie? Also no final paper has been published yet so exactly what some flags represent and which one's concern the average chart maker or scope pointer is summat else altogether, even if there is a readme explaining some points, that's not the same as a full description as will appear in the eventual published journal paper.

There's no use in the tdf I've writ for this one of the Guide proper motion corrections to epoch of date, ie I haven't used those command words to add proper motion to get epoch corrections coz it's often "problematic". Positions are thus epoch and equinox 2000 and proper motion is quoted in more info and help pop up.

Guide should not be running when you do the following. Backup any file to be edited, just make a copy of if unsure.

First, you need to get hold of download.txt. Make a back up of the original. It's in the Guide directory.

Place it in a text editor. There are already a number of catalogues listed, and the last one is followed by a line simply saying

end

insert before this last line the following, via cut and paste or type it

2803 -cI/315/out&-out.all=1 ucac3.dat

If you already have an entry/line starting 2803, use a number after whatever number you've already got.

Remember that new number of yours though, you'll need it in toolbar.dat.

Now, backup toolbar.dat. Load toolbar.dat into a text editor. Again, it's in the Guide directory.

Increment the number at top of toolbar.dat by 1. ie if it's 3000 make it say 3001, just by simple text editing.

Add/insert somewhere, probably near where you see a line like !usno.bmp, the following new line

2803 !ucac3.bmp UCAC3 data from VizieR

there are 3 spaces at the start of that line, make it line up with the other nonhashed lines in toolbar.dat if confused.

Again, if you used a number other than 2803 in download.txt you use that number instead of 2803 here in toolbar.dat.

Save that in the Guide directory.

You ain't got a button for the toolbar, I hear you cry.

Okay then, I'll upload ucac3.bmp to the yahoo webpages FILES account, download it from there. Alternatively just find any small bmp in you Guide directory, copy it, rename it to ucac3.bmp, put it any old paint package, even a basic one like the one that comes with the OS, zoom in a lot and pixel edit it to look however you want, and save it as ucac3.bmp to your Guide directory.

And that's it. You run Guide, you press the button, the ucac3 data downloads from VizieR (I'm using Strasbourg server, dunno if it's gone worldwide re servers as yet).

Except, that isn't it, coz you can't see anything.

So, here is the tdf to display it.

Cut and paste the below text into a text editor, save it to Guide directory as a file called ucac3.tdf, and you'll get help and more info. It should be on via default.

Stars are coloured via 2mass bumf, and drawn to the ucac3 model fit magnitude (I ain't bothered quoting the ucac3 aperture fit magnitude, yep, two for the price of one you get nowadays, or bogof as they call it here).

I'll shove a copy of that in files too.

You lucky people...

As I say, you'll no doubt get a more grown up version later, and those who wish to get a dvd will probably in time be able to use that, hopefully even when copied to hard drive, but these are only just shipping out, and will be slowly generated, I believe, so it may be a long while afore Guide can meaningfully support said.

Cheers

John

John Greaves


---------cut and paste from next line--------
file ucac3.dat
title UCAC3
RA H 12 9
units0 -2
de d 29 9
text 1 9
mag 70 6
photo J:163,5 H:180,5 K:197,5
~b 1 9 3UCAC %s\n\n
~r 12 9 RA 2000 %5R +/- %[24,3] mas\n
~r 29 9 Dec2000 %5D +/- %[41,3] mas\n\n
~r 29 0 RA %[12,9] deg Dec +%[30,8] deg\n\n
~r 29 0 - RA %[12,9] deg Dec %[29,9] deg\n\n
~r 52 8 RA mean epoch: %s\n
~r 61 8 Dec mean epoch: %s\n
~r100 2 %s used observations\n\n
~b117 8 muRA : %s +/- %[129,4] mas/y\n
~b134 8 muDec : %s +/- %[145,4] mas/y\n
~r113 2 \nfrom %s catalogues\n
~b 70 6 \nR_u3 : %s +/- %[86,5]\n
~b163 6 J : %s +/- %[171,4]\n
~b197 6 Ks : %s +/- %[205,4]\n

epoch 2000
type 6
goto spaces # Ignore extra spaces in 'go to'
goto case # Ignore upper vs. lower case in 'go to'
label spaces # Remove extra spaces in the labels
field 0.00 15.00
mag lim 10
shown 7
end
-----------cut and paste to previous line---------