Re: Wiki and SIMBAD

[Michael Koppelman <lolife@bitstream.net>]

On Saturday, June 14, 2003, at 04:01 PM, Stupendous Man wrote:

>   The "J" in front of the position indicates "equinox J2000",
> which is the system in which the current pipeline produces coordinates.
> Precession won't invalidate these names.  Proper motion might,
> of course, but not for a few decades to centuries.

Doh, of course.

>
>> Every
>> star TASS sees will already have a designation, if nothing better than
>> GSC. SIMBAD and the like can cross-reference based on any valid
>> designation, so we can use others' technology to create
>> cross-references, I would think. I personally would love to avoid long
>> numeric coordinate-base names in preference to GCVS/NSV/HD/GSC type
>> names, myself, personally speaking.
>
>   Well, I would, too.  But consider this situation: you have found
> something peculiar about a star, based on sifting through a database
> or set of data files.  All you know right now is its position.
> What do you do?
>
>     - go to SIMBAD and look up stars near the coordinates?
>           If so, which of the 13 names do you pick?  HD?  GSC?  SAO?
>
>     - use the position to identify the star

I personally like the former. We've discussed this on other lists and 
it seems there is a general consensus as to the hierarchy of names. 
Since we are generally talking about fairly bright stars I'd go with my 
previous recommendation of GCVS->HD->GSC. That should get them all and 
will make it easy to query them in SIMBAD.

It doesn't solve the problem you mention, which is to figure out a 
designation based on TASS coordinates, but SIMBAD and the like make 
that pretty easy. I crank the search radius down to an arcminute or 
two, limit the results to 5 per database, and just search the whole 
damn world in VizieR.

Michael Koppelman