SKY2000 Star Catalog

The SKYMAP Master Catalog, Version 4 ( Myers J.R., Sande C.B., Miller A.C., Warren Jr. W.H., Tracewell D.A., Goddard Space Flight Center, Flight Dynamics Division (2002)) consists of a Master Catalog stellar database and a collection of utility software designed to create and maintain the database and to generate derivative mission star catalogs (run catalogs). It contains an extensive compilation of information on almost 300000 stars brighter than 8.0 mag.

The original SKYMAP Master Catalog was generated in the early 1970's. Incremental updates and corrections were made over the following years but the first complete revision of the source data occurred with Version 4.0. This revision also produced a unique, consolidated source of astrometric information which can be used by the astronomical community. The derived quantities were removed and wideband and photometric data in the R (red) and I (infrared) systems were added.

Version 4 of the SKY2000 Master Catalog was completed in April 2002; it marks the global replacement of the variability identifier and variability data fields. More details can be found in the description file sky2kv4.pdf.

sky2k, sorted by ID number, is in J2000 coordinates. It is used by the program ssky2k (which calls scat) when the sky2k number is known and position, magnitude, and/or spectral type information is desired.

sky2kra is sorted by J2000 right ascension. This version is used for fast searches, at least away from the poles, by the program ssky2k (which calls scat) and for plotting by skymap.

Both files are available in the gzipped tar file, in Sun/Macintosh byte order as sky2k.tar.gz. and in PC byte order as sky2kpc.tar.gz.

Detailed descriptions of the binary header format and the binary entry format are available.

You can download the entire ASCII catalog (gzip-compressed to 31,239,317 bytes from 118,291,255 bytes) in either numeric order or
sorted by right ascension. This ReadMe file explains the format.

[WCSTools ssky2k]