The New NASA SKYMAP Spacecraft Acquisition and Tracking Catalog

A preliminary version of the new edition (4.0a) of the SKYMAP spacecraft acquisition and guidance/tracking star catalog has recently been completed at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The catalog has been completely redone from the ground up using the most up-to-date sources for astrometric, photometric, spectroscopic, double/multiple-, and variable-star data. Unnecessary data included in the previous version of SKYMAP have been omitted from the new catalog and the format has been redesigned for general astronomical use. The new catalog presently contains 299 523 entries, but that is expected to change during subsequent work. A very detailed and careful quality assurance (QA) effort is now in progress and, if that can be completed using the methods desired, the final catalog should be a high-quality comprehensive source of stellar data for stars to about magnitude 9.