WCSTools

sucac3
UCAC3 Catalog Search Program

WCSTools programs
sucac3 finds objects in the U.S. Naval Observatory UCAC3 Catalog within a specified region of the sky and lists their sky positions or lists specific entries in that catalog. It is a symbolic link to scat, and is equivalent to running scat -c ucac3 ....

By default, only the brightest 100 objects (or closest 100, if the -s p option is used) are returned. Use the -n option to increase this number.

Output is to standard output, unless the -w flag is set, in which case it goes to objectname.ucac3 or search.ucac3.

The UCAC number is the zone number (South Polar Distance in degrees by 1/2's)*2 followed by the six-digit sequence number of the star within the RA-sorted zone. This number changes with each release of the UCAC catalog.

Before you can use this program, the path to the directory containing the region files must be set. The default is to use the value of the variable ucac3path in the source code file libwcs/ucacread.c, which is initially set to /data/astrocat/ucac3, which is where the catalog resides at the Center for Astrophysics. If you do not have access to the source code and need to change the path, you can set the environment variable UCAC3_PATH to the directory containing the region files, and that will override the file setting.

The numbers of images and catalogs used are always printed after the proper motions. The position errors in arcseconds and proper motion errors in milliarcseconds per year are only printed in the -t tab-separated column (Starbase) output mode.

Command Line Arguments

CGI Queries and Parameters

sucac2 can be used remotely as a CGI executable.

Examples

Search with results to standard output
Search with results to a file
Find closest star
Find stars by number
Match stars in input catalog
Search over the web with results to standard output
Find objects found on 4 or more plates

Last updated 6 November 2009 by Doug Mink

Telescope Data Center