A Comparison of Large All-Sky Catalogs
Abstract
Recent large catalogs have revolutionized our ability to do astrometry with CCD images. The recently published FITS World Coordinate System standard has provided a standard way of parameterizing that astrometry, and the WCSTools and SExtractor software packages allow the automation of the ``plate-fitting" process. We have amassed 1728 15 arcmin × 30 arcmin CCD images of a portion of the northern sky. After matching image point sources to objects in each of the catalogs and fitting world coordinate systems to them using the IMWCS program, we find mean residuals between observed and catalog star positions of between 0.09 arcsec and 0.25 arcsec for the latest catalogs.
- Publication:
-
Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) XIII
- Pub Date:
- July 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004ASPC..314..141M