CURSA: Catalog and Table Manipulation Applications

The CURSA package manipulates astronomical catalogs and similar tabular datasets. It provides facilities for browsing or examining catalogs; selecting subsets from a catalog; sorting and copying catalogs; pairing two catalogs; converting catalog coordinates between some celestial coordinate systems; and plotting finding charts and photometric calibration. It can also extract subsets from a catalog in a format suitable for plotting using other Starlink packages such as PONGO. CURSA can access catalogs held in the popular FITS table format, the Tab-Separated Table (TST) format or the Small Text List (STL) format. Catalogs in the STL and TST formats are simple ASCII text files. CURSA also includes some facilities for accessing remote on-line catalogs via the Internet. It is part of the Starlink software collection (ascl:1110.012).