Data made accessible here today :-

ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/III/265/

namely ravedr3.dat.gz , which needs to be downloaded and unzipped to the Guide directory. You'll actually need to sort it on column 35 to use it with the tdf as is, otherwise you'll have to set "sort 1" in the tdf to read "sort 0".

Gives some basic data, including heliocentric radial velocity, and primarily RAVE derived data (cross ID stuff is untouched, always safer to do your own cross IDing within Guide, that's one of its major uses).

Unfortunately the oldish version of Guide 8 software I've got crashes out if you read beyond column about 400 in a dataset, so I couldn't include the flags for spectral quality and get it to work. Other RAVE data crops up. Most of the data is irrelevant, for some reason programmes seem to feel the need to bulk out their end product data tables nowadays with innumerable cross ID fields and "magnitudes", which is what over 70% of this dataset is.

Cut and paste the following TDF into a text editor and save in the Guide directory too :-

------start cut line before this one---------
file ravedr3.dat
title RAVE dr3 Radial Velocities
RA H 35 9
units0 -2
de d 48 9
text 18 16
~b 18 16 RAVE %s\n\n
~r 35 9 RA [2000] %R\n
~r 48 9 Dec[2000] %D\n\n
~b 81 8 HRV : %s km/s
~r 90 7 +/- %s\n
~b 98 10 \nmuRA : %s mas/y
~r109 9 +/- %s
~b119 10 \nmuDE : %s mas/y
~r130 9 +/- %s\n
~b 1 1 \n
~r140 0 1 mu from Tycho2\n
~r140 0 2 mu from SuperCosmos\n
~r140 0 3 mu from PPMX\n
~r140 0 4 mu from GSC1.2+2MASS\n
~r140 0 5 mu from UCAC2\n
~r140 0 6 mu from USNOB1.0\n
~b 1 1 \n
~r173 5 Teff : %s K\n
~r179 4 log g : %s cm/s/s\n
~r184 5 [M/H] : %s Suns\n
~r190 4 [{a}/Fe]: %s Suns\n

pref RAVE
epoch 2000
sort 1
type sC94017a;x30
label spaces
goto spaces
field 0.00 50.00
shown 5
end
---------------end cut line before this one-------------

and then you'll have some spectral info for 83,000 plus stars, albeit no spectral types. But the heliocentric radial velocities will be there (probably always best to see if you can find your own proper motion instead of the one provided).

[M/H] is "metallicity" relative to hydrogen calibrated against the Sun, {a} is alpha, that is Helium I believe, relative to Iron, calibrated against the Sun, and both are logarithmically expressed (eg -2 is one hundredth, 0.0 is 1 times the sun, etc).

Dark purple Xs at five degree or less fields, and RAVE has more Southern stuff than Northern, and grows slowly given what it is and how it is undertook. DR2 was a few years ago now. This is billed as the first formal full release, rather than the other preliminary ones.

Cheers

John