Introduction

This is the third volume in a series of CD-ROMs that present a selection of astronomical catalogs from the Astronomical Data Center (ADC). The catalogs cover a variety of subjects and were selected because they are frequently requested or because they represent updates from versions on the earlier volumes. There are two versions of this CD-ROM, one in ASCII (Volume 3, No. 1) and one in FITS (Volume 3, No. 2). Only one of these versions is packaged with this booklet. Please refer to this CD-ROM as Selected Astronomical Catalogs Vol. 3, Astronomical Data Center CD-ROM, NASA GSFC, 1996.

For each catalog a standard documentation file called "readme" was created following the standard adopted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/ADC and the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) in France. By using this readme file as input and software from the CDS (anafile), each catalog was checked for the proper data format, units, allowed data ranges, and correct sorting of the data as specified in the readme. During the verification process errors that were found were corrected in both the data and the documentation. Some catalog data files were reformatted to permit easier access or to enable their description in the byte-by-byte tables in the standard readme documentation. This standard format was used with another CDS program (tofits) to convert the data, originally in flat ASCII, to the FITS format. The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is the data exchange standard endorsed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). (See ADC Contact Information.) The body of the readme file is incorporated in the FITS primary and table extension headers.

The documentation standard applied here assures uniformity in the labeling of positional and some other information. Moreover, the column label syntax has been refined to indicate in a uniform way certain relationships between table columns such as "reference to," "uncertainty flag of," "note to," "weights of," "mean error of," etc. In addition, the standard documentation file may define NULL values and specify allowed data ranges and sorting order. The catalog documentation standard, which is in the document directory, requires that SI units be used and thus complies with the IAU recommendations.

Disk Organization and Format

The disk has a simple layout with, at the highest level, separate directories for the catalogs, software, and additional documentation. The CD-ROM is formatted according to the ISO 9660 standard, and the file names have been restricted to eight characters with a three-character extension.

The data directory is organized like the ADC on-line FTP archive, with a separate subdirectory in the catalogs directory for each catalog. The ADC catalog identification numbers are used as subdirectory names. The software directory contains catalog browsing software. The additional documentation directory contains a listing of catalogs available from the ADC as of October 15, 1996; a brief overview of the ADC; author and keyword indices; and some other documents that may be useful.

With the exception of two catalogs that have data in FITS image format and one consisting of computer programs such as Fortran 77 and C source code, the format of the data files is either ASCII text files (Volume 3, No. 1) or FITS files (Volume 3, No. 2). The FITS files have an extension .fit, a logical record length of 2,880 bytes, and no record terminators. ASCII text files have extensions .dat for data, .doc for documentation, .ps for PostScript, .tex for files in LaTeX or plain TeX, .sty for the LaTeX style file, .f or .for for Fortran code, .c for C code, .txt for text files, .hqx for binhex versions of the Macintosh software files, .bas for QBasic code and .htm for html formatted files. The readme files are text files that have no extension. See the readme files for catalogs of interest for specific information on the contents of their files.

Each ASCII text file record is terminated by a carriage return (decimal value 13; hex 0D) and a line feed, (decimal value 10; hex 0A). All the catalog data files (with extension .dat) have been changed to fixed record length by padding short records with blanks. Documentation files can have a variable record length. The software files are in several forms. (See below.) The FITS Table Browser (FTB) software appears in compressed form in a .zip file (use PKZIP or WINZIP to decompress it), packaged in a UNIX .tar file and in a compressed tar form. Included executables can be identified from their file name extension (.exe). The Macintosh software are provided in binhex (.hqx) files and must be converted. All the other software files are in flat ASCII format.

Table 1. List of Catalogs on the CD-ROM
Astrometric and Positional Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	1005     Proper Motions of 20843 Cape Zone Stars 1900 (Spencer Jones+ 1936)
No. 1  No. 2	1098A  NLTT Published Edition (Luyten 1979-80) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	1113A  General Cat. of 33342 Stars, 1950.0 (GC; Boss 1937, ADC 1992) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	1147     Carlsberg Meridian Catalogue, La Palma (Copenhagen U. Obs.+ 1989)
No. 1  No. 2	1170A  Carlsberg Meridian Catalogue, La Palma (Copenhagen U. Obs.+ 1991)
No. 1  No. 2	1189     Carlsberg Meridian Catalog, La Palma (Copenhagen U. Obs.+ 1992)
No. 1  No. 2	1205     Carlsberg Meridian Catalogue, Vol. 7 (CMC7) (Copenhagen U. Obs.+ 1993)
No. 1  No. 2	1209A  Catalogue de 2700 Double Stars (Couteau, 1993)
No. 1  No. 2	1211     Components of Double and Multiple Stars (CCDM) (Dommanget+ 1994)
No. 1  No. 2	1213     Carlsberg Meridian Catalogue, Vol. 8 (CMC8) (Copenhagen U. Obs.+ 1994)
No. 1  No. 2	1233     Orbital Elements of Minor Planets 1997 (Batrakov+ 1996)
No. 1  No. 2	1237     Washington Visual Double Star Catalog, 1996.0 (Worley+ 1996)[1]
No. 1  No. 2	1238     Yale Trigonometric Parallaxes, Fourth Edition (van Altena+ 1995)[1]
Photometric Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	2084     13-Color Photometry of 1380 Bright Stars (Johnson, Mitchell 1975) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	2116     Photoelectric Photometric Cat., Johnson UBVRI System (Lanz 1986) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	2122B  UBV Photoelectric Photometry Catalogue (Mermilliod 1987)
No. 1  No. 2	2143A  Guide Star Photometric Catalog, Updated Version 1 (Lasker+ 1988,1996) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	2158A   uvby, beta Photoelectric Photometric Cat. (Hauck, Mermilliod 1990) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	2172B  Gen. Cat. of Variable Stars V1.1, Vol. IV (Durlevich+ 1996) [1] [2]
No. 1  No. 2	2193     UBV Photoelectric Catalogue: Data 1986-1992 (Mermilliod 1994)[2]
No. 1  No. 2	2209     Catalog of Infrared Observations (CIO; Gezari+ 1996)[1]
Spectroscopic Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	3017B  Early-Type Emission-Line Stars (Wackerling 1970) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3031B  Michigan 2-D MK Types for the HD Stars 1 (Houk, Cowley 1975) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3039A  Ultraviolet Bright Star Spectrophotometric Catalogue (Jamar+ 1976) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3051B  Michigan 2-D MK Types for the HD Stars 2 (Houk 1978) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3067A  Be Stars (Jaschek, Egret 1982) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3080     Michigan 2-D MK Types for the HD Stars 3 (Houk 1982) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3115     IUE Atlas of O-Type Stellar Spectra, 1200-1900 A (Walborn+ 1985) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3129     Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs 3 (McCook, Sion 1987) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3133     Michigan 2-D MK Types for the HD Stars 4 (Houk, Smith-Moore 1988) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3135     Henry Draper Catalogue and Extension (Cannon+ 1918-1924; ADC 1989) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3156     Cool Galactic Carbon Stars, 2nd Edition (Stephenson 1989) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	3165     A Catalogue of [Fe/H] Determinations (Cayrel de Strobel+ 1991) [1] [2]
No. 1  No. 2	3174     High Resolution Atlas of Symbiotic Stars (Van Winckel+ 1993, 1994)
No. 1  No. 2	3188     IUE Atlas of B-Type Stellar Spectra (Walborn+ 1995)
No. 1  No. 2	3189     General Catalogue of MK Classifications (Buscombe 1995)
Cross Identification Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	4012     SAO-HD-GC-DM Cross Index (ADC 1983) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	4019     CD-CPD Cross Index (Rappaport, Warren 1987)
No. 1  No. 2	4021     Infrared Source Cross Index (Schmitz, Mead, Gezari 1987)
Combined and Derived Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	5039     Fourth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binary Stars (Worley+ 1983) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	5050     Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit, Warren 1991) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	5053     Brightest Stars (Ochsenbein, Halbwachs 1987)
No. 1  No. 2	5059     Cataclysmic Bin, Low-Mass X-Ray Bin, Related Obj. (Ritter 1990) [2]
No. 1  No. 2	5061     Ptolemy's Star Catalogue (Almagest; Manitus 1913; Jaschek 1987)
No. 1  No. 2	5070A  Nearby Stars 3, Preliminary (Gliese, Jahreiss 1991) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	5082     Cataclysmic Binaries (Ritter+ 1993)
No. 1  No. 2	5085     Stellar Mass Catalogue (Belikov 1995)
Miscellaneous Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	6016     Line Spectra of the Elements (Reader, Corliss 1980-1981)
No. 1  No. 2	6025     POSS Plate Data (Natl. Geo. Soc., Palomar Obs. 1960) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	6032     Bidelman-Parsons Spectroscopic/Bibliographic Cat. (Parsons+ 1980)
No. 1  No. 2	6040     Revised Yale Isochrones and Luminosity Functions (Green+ 1986)
No. 1  No. 2	6042     Identification of a Constellation from Position (Roman 1987)
No. 1  No. 2	6063     Orbital, Precessional, and Insolation Quan for Earth (Laskar+ 1993) *
No. 1  No. 2	6066     Moon and Planets, Precession Formulae and Mean Elements (Simon+ 1994) *
No. 1  No. 2	6071     Revised Version of the ILLSS Catalogue (Coluzzi 1993)
No. 1  No. 2	6079     Lunar Solution ELP 2000-82B (Chapront-Touze+ 1988)
Non-Stellar and Extended Objects Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	7007A  Dark Nebulae (Lynds 1962 updated) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7020     H II Regions (Sharpless 1959) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7026D  Uppsala General Catalogue of Galaxies (UGC; Nilson 1973) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7034B  ESO/Uppsala Survey of the ESO(B) Atlas (Lauberts 1982) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7044B  Star Clusters/Associations. II. Globular Clusters (Ruprecht+ 1981) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7054     Extragalactic Radio Source Identifications (Veron-Cetty+ 1983) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7062A  Morphological Catalog of Galaxies (Vorontsov-Velyaminov+ 1962-68) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7092A  Open Cluster Data, 5th Edition (Lynga 1987) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7100     Morphological Catalog of Galaxies, Vol. 5 (Kogoshvili 1987) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7113     Galaxies, Quasars Observed in the IRAS Survey, Ver. 2 (IPAC 1989) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	7145     Nearby Galaxies Catalogue (NBG) (Tully 1988)
No. 1  No. 2	7155     Third Reference Cat. of Bright Galaxies (RC3; de Vaucouleurs+ 1991) [2]
No. 1  No. 2	7173     Catalogue of Seyfert Galaxies (Lipovetsky+ 1988)
No. 1  No. 2	7188     Quasars and Active Nuclei, 7th Edition (Veron-Cetty+ 1996)[1] [2]
No. 1  No. 2	7193     CfA Redshift Catalogue (Huchra+ 1995) [2]
Radio Data:
CD-ROM	ID        Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
No. 1  No. 2	8004     Fourth Cambridge Survey of Radio Sources (4C; Pilkington+ 1965-67) [1]
No. 1  No. 2	8028     Bell Laboratories H I Survey (Stark+ 1992)**
No. 1  No. 2	8039     Composite CO Survey of the Milky Way (Dame 1987)**
[1]	Updated or corrected from the version published on Selected Astronomical Cat alogs, Volume 1.
[2]	Updated or corrected from the version published on Selected Astronomical Catalogs, Volume 2.
*	Catalogs 6063 and 6066 are in fact software packages. These are provided as ASCII files on both versions of this volume (Volume 3, No. 1 and No. 2). No FITS version is provided.
**	Data for catalogs 8028 and 8039 are in FITS image format - not FITS table format.

Catalog Browsing Software

For browsing the FITS files and extracting records of interest, L. Brotzman's FITS Table Browser is useful. It is included in its original form. The FITS Table Browser was primarily written to allow owners of an Intel-based PC using the MS-DOS operating system to access FITS files. The Browser software will allow the user to access FITS files on the Macintosh platform. Selected records may be extracted from ASCII tables using the QBasic program FIND provided by J. A. Watko. The Aurora and BBEdit Lite editors give access to large files such as those on the CD-ROM. Aurora is a text editor for MD-DOS that allows the editing of extremely large files (up to 1GB in size).

It is hoped that the FITS Table Browser Users' Guide, prepared by T. K. Simmons, will help new users of the FTB program to avoid some of the problems experienced by their predecessors. The users' guide describes how to locate and extract the desired records from a FITS table. The original FITS Table Browser was written specifically to work with the catalogs on Volume 1. The features that were designed to take advantage of information given in the Volume 1 FITS header comments do not work with the comments in FITS header files in Volumes 2 and 3. The user is cautioned to review the FITS headers separately and to give particular attention to the specific notes on the fields, which in Volume 3, No. 2 can only be viewed by reading the header comments or the readme file. In all other respects the FITS Table Browser works with the FITS formatted catalog files.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this work was provided by the NASA Office of Space Science under contract NAS5-30960. The ADC is operated by and receives guidance from the Astrophysics Data Facility (ADF) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) provided support during the editing and premastering of the CD-ROM. ADC acknowledges the assistance provided by Miranda Beall, technical editor, and the support of the NSSDC's Richard Chu during the making of the CD-Recordable premasters. The data were given to the international astronomical data centers (ADC and CDS) by many authors whose names are listed in the readme files. Usage of the data in future publications should be acknowledged by citing the original reference as well as this CD-ROM as the delivery vehicle. Many people helped to prepare the data in the standard form and validate the results. ADC is grateful to Francois Ochsenbein of the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg, France, for his continuing contributions to the documentation standard and his catalog preparation software as well as for the documentation and checking of a number of catalogs. ADC extends its thanks to those who have reported errors contained in catalogs on earlier volumes. These reports helped the ADC update many of the catalogs in this volume.

Graphics Credits:

Cover and Disc designs by James Gass and Robert Kilgore.
Front cover art, "Tycho at Uraniborg," courtesy Yerkes Observatory.
Star photo, courtesy Nancy Roman.

References

ADC Contact Information

The ADC maintains a World Wide Web site at URL http://adc.astro.umd.edu/ and an FTP site at ftp://adc.astro.umd.edu/pub/adc/. If errors are found to exist on the enclosed CD-ROM, they will be documented in the "errors" subdirectory of the FTP site, ftp://adc.astro.umd.edu/pub/adc/errors/. If you discover errors or problems with the enclosed CD-ROM, please notify the ADC via e-mail to webmaster@adc.astro.umd.edu or by telephone at (301) 286-8310.

Information on the FITS standard and the NASA FITS Support Office can be found at the URL http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_home.html.

FOR ASSISTANCE OR INFORMATION
   General Inquiries Dealing with Catalog or
   CD-ROM Requests 

   Requesters WITHIN the United States:
      NSSDC Coordinated Request and User Support Office
      NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 633.4
      Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, U.S.A.

   Requesters OUTSIDE the United States:
      World Data Center-A for Rockets and Satellites
      NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 633
      Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, U.S.A.

   For All Requesters:
      E-Mail: request@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov
      Telephone: (301) 286-6695
      FAX: (301) 286-1635

   General Inquiries on Astronomical Catalogs, Data Submission, 
   Data Availability, and the ADC's Internet Services

      Astronomical Data Center, Code 631
      NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
      Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

      Gail L. Schneider
      E-Mail: gail.l.schneider@gsfc.nasa.gov OR
              webmaster@adc.astro.umd.edu
      Telephone: (301) 286-8310; FAX: (301) 286-1771

      Melissa C. Larkin
      E-Mail: larkin@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov
      Telephone: (301) 286-0679; FAX: (301) 286-1635

   Questions About Scientific Content of Catalogs

      Nancy G. Roman
      E-Mail: nancy.g.roman@gsfc.nasa.gov
      Telephone: (301) 286-4070; FAX: (301) 286-1771

      N. Paul M. Kuin
      E-Mail: kuin@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov
      Telephone: (301) 286-0677; FAX: (301) 286-1771