Here's a nice astrometric one for the Southern Hemisphere people, stemming from -20 degrees declination to the South Celestial Pole.

http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spm4cat/spm4.html

with details in the readme here (the full paper is pending)

http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spm4cat/readme_spm4.txt

This goes down to as far as V 18 or more, and some of the photometry is actually CCD photometry, and should give V and B good to about +/- 0.1 and certainly far better than USNO x.n catalogues.

And astrometrically in principle it should be better than both USNO B1.0 and PPMXL, at least down to its limiting magnitude, whilst it goes quite a bit fainter than the UCAC lists. From the above webpages you can see some of the processing equipment and routes used for the various usno lists were also used for it.

The data comes in one degree wide declination strips, each of which has data sorted on RA. There are flags so CCD based V and B magnitudes can be pointed out, and 2MASS photometry linked, as well as proper motion data.

So the below TDF is an example one for the smallest, southernmost dataset, that will plot the star to the V magnitude, correct for the proper motion in terms of position, and give details of position, proper motion and magnitudes. Stars are also approximately coloured based on V and B magnitudes. Remember the photographic V and B will not be as good as the CCD. Stars are automatically adjusted to magnitude, but do not start to appear until ten degree fields or less. A TDF can be made for each stripe by simply changing the name of the file in the first line. The example one is for rs89.asc, which is the uncompressed form of rs89.asc.bz2 from the above ftp site. Place it in the Guide directory and cut and paste the following TDF as spm4.tdf into the Guide directory.

If your favoured compressor application cannot deal with these, look here http://www.bzip.org/downloads.html.

There appear to be a fairly large number of CCD V measures. For instance, for -70 degrees south to the Pole there are about 7 million objects of which about very roughly 1 million have CCD V measures.

It looks a bit big to have all of it easily, even if the DVD was ordered it would have to be decompressed onto a hard disk, yet people are quite willing to have UCAC or USNO B1.0 on hard disk, and this should at least better quality than the latter and possibly comparable to the former whilst going deeper than said. I know SPM3.3 was passable quality, having used it in the past, and this is supposed to be one step further in processing.

Incidentally, you don't have to have a TDF per strip, there is a way of multiple echoing such files within one TDF, after the first file has been defined, it's a clever loop thing in the TDF system, it's just so very long since I used it that I can't remember how to do it, but I seem to remember it was ideal for incrementally numbered files like these.

Incidentally, the example file, being so near the Pole, will plot somewhat slowly because of the projection there.

Cheers

John

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file rs89.asc
title SPM4
RA H 2 10
units0 -2
ra p 38 8
pm_ra_unit .001
de d 14 10
de p 47 8
pm_de_unit .001
mag 76 5
text 109 10
photo B:70,5 V:76,5
~b109 10 SPM4 %s\n\n
~r 2 10 R.A.2000 %R +/- %[26,5] arcsecs\n
~r 14 10 Dec2000 %D +/- %[32,5] arcsecs\n\n
~r 2 10 RA %s deg Dec %[14,10] deg\n\n
~b 38 8 muRA %s
~r 56 6 +/- %s
~b 5 1 mas/y\n
~b 47 8 muDE %s
~r 63 6 +/- %s
~b 5 1 mas/y\n\n
~b 76 5 V %s
~b 83 0 3 CCD
~b 70 5 \nB %s
~b 82 0 3 CCD
~b124 6 \nJ %s\n
~b138 6 K %s\n

epoch 2000
type 6
sort 1
field 0.00 100.00
mag lim 10
shown 7
end
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