"User-added datasets" shown in Guide 8.0

Last updated 25 February 2002

Guide has a rather elaborate set of features that enable users to add display of almost any plain-text astronomical dataset that contains RA/dec position values. Write a little file to tell Guide such things as which columns contain RA minutes, declination degrees, magnitude, and so forth, and you can get Guide to show that dataset.

Many people have already done this for over a hundred datasets, and these are already included for you on the Guide 8.0 CDs. They are listed below.

In many cases, links are provided to the text posted when the datasets were first added to Guide, giving details as to what the datasets are and why you would want to use them. These details often mention things such as "to use this, download the following and do thus-and-such". Ignore this. All that applied to Guide 7 and earlier versions. The following datasets are all provided on the Guide 8 disks, with no downloads needed (except in some cases to get updated catalogs.)

Radio surveys:

Atlas pages:

These enable display of the boundaries of pages from the atlases to appear on-screen. Quite handy at times for figuring out which page would show a given object.

Variable stars:

Quasars/AGNs:

The above eleven datasets allow display of the areas covered by assorted sky surveys in assorted photometric bands. You can also click on the displayed plates to get data about them (exposure date/time and duration, etc.)

Double/Multiple stars:

Photometry:

Alignment stars for assorted commercial telescopes:

Assorted deep-sky object catalogues:

Display of downloaded datasets:

The above datasets are multi-gigabyte monsters not actually distributed with Guide. Instead, you can download areas of interest from Web servers, then show the data in Guide.

Ephemeris/minor planet related:

These are not exactly "objects", but they are data minor planet observers sometimes wish to show on-screen.

Datasets shown on Earth maps (in eclipse mode, for example):

Assorted items that don't fit the above categories: